Mapping Fever: Disease Archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and My Class’s Google Earth Project “The city was operating on a different kind of time,” observes Candace Chen, the protagonist of Ling Ma’s alarmingly prescient 2018 pandemic novel, Severance (248). During the devastating global spread of the fictional Shen Fever, Candace—immune to the disease—begins to take…
Tag: Disability
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.
Reframing the Cultural Clash: A Literary, Disability Studies Reading of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
Anne Fadiman’s 1997 bestselling narrative nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, meticulously outlines the story of Lia Lee. Lia was a young Laotian refugee diagnosed with and unsuccessfully treated for severe epilepsy over the course of her childhood in California…
We of the Tender Organs
Travis Chi Wing Lau// *adapted from a presentation at the Modern Language Association 2022 annual conference In the wake of the recent discourses surrounding disability fakery and the accusations that those with long COVID are faddishly embracing a new identity of self-victimization in a world that needs to “return to normal,” I have been meditating…
Funding Wellness: How Grantmakers Impact Community Health
Brynn Fitzsimmons and Rebekah Swank // The narratives we use to secure funding for community-facing work, whether that work is explicitly health-focused or not, can and do impact the health of that work and, more importantly, the people doing it.
Notes on Spinal Catastrophism
Travis Chi Wing Lau // “It is the duty of a spine to destroy the universe; or, a spine is the universe’s method of acknowledging this duty to self-destruct.”[1] To my scoliosis, reads the dedication to Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Urbanomic 2019). This line alone was more than enough for me to…
Book Review: Narrative Art and the Politics of Health
Steven Rhue // Narrative Art and the Politics of Health stands out as wonderful collection of essays that unites disparate stories of health and wellbeing entangled with in the politics of medicine and healing. Brooks and Blanchette have carefully organized this assortment of writings in three thematic divisions. Part 1 of the volume concerns institutional narratives that confront…
“Making the Poem Physical”: A Talk With Kamil Guenatri, A Disabled Performance Artist
Pauline Picot // Kamil Guenatri is a performance artist. He first started working as a computer engineer before changing his course entirely at the age of 25, when he decided to practice performance art. Since 2010, he has been creating and presenting his work in France and abroad.
Emotions as Ethnography: The Story Doctor’s Toolbox
Cover Image: My Aunts by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2021. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo// I am always “in my feelings.” I say this unapologetically, and knowing that some Latina women are rendered in popular culture as lacking control of their emotions and impulses. The overlap between these representations and my ethnographic life does not escape me. Empathy, “my gut,” memories,…
‘Laughing At’: The Exploitation of Disability as Comedic Entertainment in Pre-Industrial Europe
James Belarde // “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.” –Nathaniel Lee, 17th century dramatist, after being committed to Bethlem Hospital In late June 1340, the members of the French royal court found themselves in a tricky situation. France’s navy had just been decimated in the Battle…