The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…
Tag: body
Review: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
When Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive was published by Alice James Press last year, I couldn’t put it down—and after I finished reading through it, I didn’t want to put it down. I kept it in my car as I drove to the National Institutes of Health for a bioethics fellowship;…
(Dis)articulation: “Broken Ladies” and the Anatomized Female Body
Articulating symptoms of illness often first requires dis-articulation: this part hurts; this one thing happened; I started feeling this, then this; are these things related? First narrativized as a series of observations, symptoms separate out into individual signs (one symptom, after all, could be the effect of one cause, but a different symptom could be…
Book Review: Caring Visualities, or Visualizing Care in Fixing Images
“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…
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…