Eli Clare’s new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (2025), presents a challenge to disability studies. The most impactful challenges to this field over the past few decades have critiqued its narrow focus on whiteness, the West, and physical disability, with more recent work attempting to understand disability through intersectional and global frameworks as well…
Tag: Language
Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet
“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.” In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as…
Whose Words Are Those? Language, Identity, and Medical Texts in Tokugawa Japan
In the spring of 1795, Japanese physician Ōtsuki Gentaku (大槻玄沢,1757–1827) recalled the time he spent in his youth with Takebe Seian (建部清庵,1712–1782), his mentor in medicine. Through his career as a specialist in external medicine (geka), Seian developed an enthusiasm for Western learning and Dutch studies (rangaku) (Takebe, Sugita, and Sugita 1795, preface). Taking off…
Book Review: Sergio Loo, Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body. Translated by Will Stockton (2019)
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller // No one deserves cancer. In his translator’s note of Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body (2019), Will Stockton references Susan Sontag’s critiques of the tendency to conceptualize illness as a metaphor. In Illness as a Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Sontag poignantly challenges…
Ode on a Greek Letter
April Sharp // The fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet is currently in the spotlight, but for all the wrong reasons. On November 26th, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.529 as a variant of concern and gave it the label Omicron. The use of the Greek alphabet to label variants…
The Kinetic Eloquence of Hands
Botsa Katara // Listen: a four–worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeeis, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. (Joyce 45) If listening ceases with speech, and speech with sound, then does language cease too? And,…
Laughter Part 2: Is It Safe To Laugh Yet?
James Belarde // “It seems to me that you can know a man by his laughter, and if from the first encounter you like the laughter of some completely unknown person, you may boldly say that he is a good man.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes from A Dead House “A woolly mammoth and a saber-tooth…
Translating Medicine Part I: Introduction
Roanne Kantor // We’re rounding out the first year at Synapsis. It makes me want to come full circle, to re-approach the very first questions I asked in this venue: about the nature of interdisciplinary research on health and medicine, and the shared language we develop to make that research possible. The thing about this “department…
Tears and rain. Finding a bird and a depressed place.
Credit: Skies above Lake Murray, S.C. Taken by Adam Cole. Retrieved from NPR.org. The first time I saw a parliament of rooks flocking in the early evening sky, I was studying for my Master’s degree. Let me explain. We found ourselves on the edge of a field with naturalist Mark Cocker, just as dusk was…