In the summer of 2022, I attended the VariAbilities conference hosted by The Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida. As a part of the program, presenters were invited to tour the museum’s extensive circus and print archive. Among these artifacts were a small collection of photo albums that featured both named and unnamed performers of…
Tag: affect
Desiring Difference: A Chronicle of Wonder, Part One
Desiring Difference: A Chronicle of Wonder, Part One “I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the streets is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.” –Geek Love by Katherine Dunn Over the last week and half, I’ve been teaching Katherine Dunn’s…
Representing Women’s Pain: “The Pain Scale” and “The Retrievals”
In her 2005 poetic essay “The Pain Scale,” author Eula Biss challenges the conception of medicalized pain rating systems. She describes how pain ranked at “0” or “10” seems unfathomable, given the impossibility of representing pain’s absolute absence or its “worst imaginable” presence (Biss 30). She also critiques how patients often succumb to the “tyranny…
The Epigenetics of Trauma
Diana Rose Newby // The growth of the memory culture may, indeed, be a symptom of a need for inclusion in a collective membrane forged by a shared inheritance of multiple traumatic histories and the individual and social responsibility we feel toward a persistent and traumatic past … (Hirsch 111) What does it mean to…
Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Interdisciplinarity, and the Use of Medical Humanities
Roanne Kantor // I was recently giving a talk at my alma mater—a weird experience in and of itself. At the end, a senior colleague asked a rather dumbfounding question: “What do we even want from the literary? I’m so fed up with it, but I can’t seem to quit.” I ask you, dear reader,…