Touch Me, I'm Sick
A Memoir in Essays
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
Reject the stigmas of trauma and chronic illness by fostering queer forms of intimacy—and embracing the many ways humans can care for one another.
The writer behind the popular @softcore_trauma Instagram offers a deeply personal memoir for folks seeking healing and better care.
The forms of intimacy and care that we’ve been sold are woefully inadequate and problematic. In a world that treats those who are sick and traumatized as problems in need of a cure, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman offers a different story.
Trauma, which all too often manifests as chronic illness, tells us that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in. A world that promotes individualism, fractures us from community through violence and systemic oppression, and leaves us traumatized. That is what we need to cure.
While unveiling their own lived experiences caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness, Feldman provides roadmaps for embracing queer modes of care, or “hysterical intimacies,” that reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Feldman looks at the lengthy history of branding girls, women, and femmes–and their desires–as sick, from the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the 19th and 20th centuries. What emerges is a valiant call for rethinking the ways we seek healing.
This compelling blend of theory, personal narrative, and cultural criticism offers a path forward for reimagining the shapes and forms that intimacy, care, and interdependence can take.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Educator Feldman debuts with a vulnerable and ambitious essay collection about illness. The book opens with a short prelude juxtaposing two trauma responses to sexual assault—Ida Bauer (better known as "Dora" in Freud's famous case study of female hysteria) was stricken by temporary muteness, the author by a violent eczema flare-up—laying the groundwork to explore intimate links between chronic illness, trauma, hysteria, and sex. From there, Feldman examines society's tendency to deem certain bodies as "unworthy of desire" and "pathologize" sex that fails to adhere to narrow standards, how illness produces isolation and how unexpected interventions like "sickness selfies"—selfies of ill people, "taken in beds and bathtubs, in hospitals or treatment centers"—combat it by constructing "a community of care" between the ill person and the healthy, and the ways those in queer and straight relationships harm and heal one another. Raw depictions of the author's own encounters with illness—including their struggles with fibromyalgia, and caring for their ALS-stricken father—are interwoven with an impressive array of critical theory and cultural criticism, making for a wide-ranging look at the often-binary ways society views bodies and how communities can foster new forms of healing. The result is eye-opening.
