For some of us, there is a relationship between healing and justice because what oppresses us has also made us suffer trauma and its accompanying symptoms. Oppression, domination, and violence live first and foremost in our bodies. As much as they are ideological systems, their effect is always material; they deal in matter: flesh, bones, blood. They pierce tissue with bullets, crack necks with boots, make stomachs chew on their own acid out of hunger, imprison bodies in small lightless rooms made of concrete. They flood brains and nervous systems with adrenaline and panic. On the less dramatic side, they work insidiously: they instantiate and re-instantiate memories of unhelpful doctors and police who are not figures of help or safety but of violence and terror; they invalidate and dismiss experiences of pain and suffering, especially those experiences that they’ve directly caused. They deny access to medications and therapies, they frighten and alienate with categories that pathologize and discriminate, they construct a world whose very premise insists that suffering, illness, and disability are abnormal and wrong, and that banishes those who experience such stuff. 

 Johanna Hedva