investigatory-somatic work performed by david buuck and ca conrad,

i asked not: what is this situation of accelerated becoming good for? but: in what ways has this so-called body always been a site of occultation, a deluded witness, where my understanding of agency has been predicated on layers of mediations much thinner than anything here should allow for?

A technician can wheel me into the sick meat tube and my meat will register.

The medical gaze, leering ever pointedly since the end of the nineteenth century (see Foucault), works two ways: 1.) it reveals things about you that you yourself did not know, and 2.) if it cannot see your illness, your symptoms don’t exist.

The ill have no time or energy for anything other than the raw and startled truth of another’s soul.

For relief, Marat spent as much time as possible in a medicinal bath, plotting the deaths of his enemies.

A world in which I am always the piece that doesn’t fit and also a body that speaks or argues loudly—even against my will—about the problems with such normalizing structures.

pain, I spent a lot of time with, in Zen scholar Charles Egan’s words, “Existence and void...mixed up” (p.161).

In an essay titled “Feminist Disability Studies,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes the “major aim of all of my work in both literary and feminist studies is to show that the always overdetermined metaphoric uses of disability efface and distort the lived experience of people with disabilities, evacuating the political significance of our lives and