'Body Work' argues for the power of personal narratives
and for that, we need to hear their stories. I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating: the resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part—and often nothing but—a resistance to movements for social justice.
Melissa Febos • Body Work
Part of our process of learning to love ourselves and each other and to practice care means doing the incredibly risky work of tapping back into the disabled body/mind we have been taught to suppress and abandon, to learn what our boundaries are, and what we want, need, and desire.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha • The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
One reason Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has been so popular, and that other works of autotheory including Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable books, divulging very personal details in ways that are neither confessional nor egoistic, but are instead an offering to readers: here is mine.
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