Writing

"I wondered what would emerge from facilitating an embodied exploration with people who had formed deep relationships of trust through making art and discussing scholarly texts together. I wondered if it would even be possible for us to “drop in” to our bodies within this institution of uncertainty, surveillance, and social death. But we found a way."

“How can you welcome people into your home, when so many people are being forced from theirs? And what kind of a welcome can include the many people in our cross-impairment disability arts community, making that one ‘home’ accessible to all?”

"In my mid-twenties, I began to experience the effects of a chronic pain condition, which has profoundly changed the way I live. Sick bodies have long been considered monstrous, and monsters have served as the vehicle for people to examine their fears of illness, disability, and death. I have often felt like I have a monstrous secret."

"This text was composed in fifteenth-century Yemen by Ibrāhīm al-Azraq, a time and place remote from most histories of science and medicine in the medieval Islamic word. On folio 227a, I came across a magic square that I had come to recognize from many other medical manuscripts made in Yemen. Little did I know at the time, this square had been recommended to ease difficult labor since the ninth century."

“Working with an archive of men’s writing so full of silences, absent a single surviving medical text by a woman, what can we know of women’s knowledge—especially what was taught and practiced beyond the text? What were old women presumed to know about medicine, and why was it always old women? The figure of the wise old woman makes the gendered hierarchies of formal medical practice more starkly visible.”

“Physicians’ understandings of sex did not automatically sort humans into men and women but included other sexes in between. It is striking how wondrous some writers in the medieval Islamic world considered this fluidity of sexual anatomy to be, while this fluidity has been considered an aberration or monstrosity in other times and places, including our own. But these stories are also important for physicians to hear.”

“Do histories of slavery during earlier epidemics teach us anything about ‘essential workers’ today? When we think about the past through the actions of ordinary people in times of calamity, their traces may point us towards actions more surprising and transformative than the advice offered to us by voices in the present.”