excerpts Hedva

Vulnerability is a fundamental aspect of being human - precarity is when vulnerability is exploited to the point of unlivable experience.

The presumption that you can make for us a world that doesn’t integrate us into its design is a world in which we will never feel or be integrated—and so, what use is this vision of wholeness if it can exist as whole, wholly without us? What kind of integration is it when it is made of only one part? By collaborating as equals, utilizing each person’s skills, we might together build a world that contains multiple parts, a world that is not only one part—your part?

There is a clear association between the disorder and childhood interpersonal traumas in a substantial portion of individuals…In particular, emotional abuse and emotional neglect have been most strongly and consistently associated with the disorder.

But the DSM has little to say beyond this passage on the symptoms of DP/DR that can be correlated to a cause; that is, why someone might experience such feelings. And the extent that they allow trauma to reach is only interpersonal, never generational, institutional, or societal.

We can see the state as a mechanism that creates depersonalization. It is a device that simultaneously produces and perpetuates de-personhood while negating the possibility of self-control. How about that for a cause?

That one cannot possess one’s own self, it follows, precipitates the necessity of a society that can do it for you. In turn, this instantiates the construct of a self in ownership of itself as what is the most—the only—acceptable kind of person. 

I think of the residents of Flint who had absolutely no control over whether they were in possession of the most basic resource needed for their life to be sustained: water fit to drink.

Ann Cvetkovich writes: “What if depression could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives?” I’d like to change the word “depression” here to be all mental illnesses.

“Sickness” as we speak of it today is perceived through its binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal. 

The Sick Woman is anyone who does not have this guarantee of care. The Sick Woman is told that, to this society, her care, even her survival, does not matter. The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible.

When a person feels that they are not real, or that the world around them is not real, and that they have no control over either realm: how do they fit into the universal version of “person”? In other words, who will they be allowed to be—or not to be? Hamlet’s famous question reveals his privilege, power, and, specifically, his authority: that he gets to decide whether to be or not. At its etymological root, authority is about authorship: Hamlet can be the author of himself. How many are not allowed this? Whose stories have already been written for them? 

“The self-determined thing cannot be so if it emerges in a relationship,” Denise Ferreira da Silva writes, emphasis mine. So, what about those of us who have not had the privilege that Hamlet had, to write our own story on our own terms? (There is a clear association between the disorder and traumas.)

What about those of us who have emerged vis-à-vis others, in relationship to each other, and because of our own Other-ness? (My thoughts don’t feel like my own!) Da Silva calls them “no-bodies.” Jack Halberstam calls them “zombies.” Neve Be has called them “invisible theorists.”

Most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering and no doubt invisible.

Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. 

Johanna Hedva