“Koat phey khmaoch, châng moel’ (she is afraid of ghosts, so she wants to look), he said to me, not turning from his typing… The ward is not specialized in ghosts (there are other experts for those beings), yet doctors and nurses understood that patients might connect pain or a dream with a supernatural intervention…
Tag: body
You Threw This at Us. Now We’re Throwing It Back at You.
What is the most violent thing a member of the medical community ever told you ? “You Threw This at Us. Now We’re Throwing It Back at You.” is a collaborative and performative piece about medical abuse.
Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I
In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Facing down the barrel at the end of my reproductive year, the advent of menopause amplified my embodied differences.
With Regard to the Pubic Hair of Women
Have you wondered what a society that holds young women’s pubic hair in high regard looks like?
The Head of a Dog or Horn of a Rhino: Meaning, Milton, and Me
THE HEAD OF A DOG OR HORN OF A RHINO: MEANING, MILTON, & ME [H]e reproaches me with want of beauty and loss of sight: “A monster huge and hideous, void of sight.” … [B]ut he immediately corrects himself, and says, “though not indeed huge, for there cannot be a more spare, shrivelled and bloodless…
The Spaces Between
Jac Saorsa, Artist-Residence// Recent health problems have weakened me a little … sapped my energy and left me feeling somewhat detached from the reality I have been living in. But the new reality, the different way of understanding myself has forced me, gently, to consider my own mortality from a deeply personal perspective. Two ways…
Bodily Loss in Illness: The Phenomenology of Influenza in Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was
Avril Tynan // It is an uncanny experience to read Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was in 2021. Written in 2013 by renowned Icelandic author Sjón and translated into English by Victoria Cribb in 2016, the short novel tells the story of a pandemic that surges across Europe and devastates the isolated Icelandic capital. The…
The New Normal: Dating During COVID-19
Dr. Brian J. Troth // The trouble with normal is that so very few people are. I’m referencing Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal, in which the author shows that our notion of ‘normal’ is the result of society accumulating data. Once we knew how many people fit into a category, the majority category became…
Upon the Arraignment, Condemnation, and Execution of Elizabeth Stile, 1579
Kate Bolton Bonnici // Elizabeth Stile was executed in England for witchcraft in February 1579. In what follows, I consider an anonymous “news of the day” pamphlet about her case, using critical poetry as scholarly method. (This pamphlet is part of a larger genre of 16th/17th-century writing on witchcraft trials.) I concentrate on the description…