Body & Mind Archives - Page 14 of 16

Literature

“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

The New School poet’s latest collection retraces the losses of the AIDS crisis

March 9, 2020 • by Mark Bibbins

From 13th Balloon What might anyone have made of you and me as babies born into the mess and ferment of the late 1960s Working-class babies born to parents who themselves were babies during World War II Were they worried already about Vietnam or about some other monstrous hand that would grab us from our cribs by our feet and throw us into the war that ...

Interviews

Permission To Be Yourself: An Interview With Mira Jacob

The National Book Critics Circle finalist for her Autobiography, Good Talk

March 6, 2020 • by Mira Jacob and Ramya Ramana

--- Ramya Ramana [RR]: So first I want to say thank you for writing this, from the bottom of my heart because it was just so refreshing to read a story that I could see myself in, and so much of your journey. I felt like I see myself and I ...

Permission To Be Yourself: An Interview With Mira Jacob

Psyche

I Started Transitioning This Past Summer. The Hardest Part Is the Unearthing of Past Traumas

On trans identity, poetry, and fighting for the dignity of one’s body

February 18, 2020 • by Isa Guzman

i. i say morning off-white ceiling insect corpse light dent fixture twenty-year-old piece of double-sided tape breath breaking mirror sun through gate’s red curtain I say to the ceiling: “I wish I wasn’t here anymore.” My body hadn’t been cooperating with me. I was constantly tired. A long-term relationship had ended. My graduate ...

I Started Transitioning This Past Summer. The Hardest Part Is the Unearthing of Past Traumas

Psyche

Trauma, Transitioning, and “Puberty Book-Ended by Free Fall”

In a new cycle of poems, poet Isa Guzman explores their personal experience of gender-confirmation

February 18, 2020 • by Isa Guzman

1. I think with observable sunsets my mother’s bodily purging calm hums abstracted pigeons awake along a broken wall of context the way the hip doesn’t curve won’t ever the alienating anatomic bone structure of verbs growing winds and winding contours of hysteria anatomical witchcraft another day another extension of empty ...

Trauma, Transitioning, and “Puberty Book-Ended by Free Fall”

Psyche

#MeToo and the Ontological Trauma of Consciousness Raising, Part 1

Reflections and Conversations Across the Gender Divide

February 10, 2020 • by Andrea Singer

It was two years ago that actor Alyssa Milano, in response to the sexual abuse allegations against media mogul Harvey Weinstein, brought activist Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement into the social media mainstream. And it was one year ago that Christine Blasey Ford, in the midst of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Justice hearing, ...

#MeToo and the Ontological Trauma of Consciousness Raising, Part 1

Memory

This Atom Bomb in Me

An atomic childhood in Appalachia

January 28, 2020 • by Lindsey A. Freeman

The following is an excerpt, published by permission. My grandfather was an atomic courier…My atomic immersion began when I visited my grandparents as a child and encountered the vibrant matter of Oak Ridge. As an adult, I write about the place to try to untangle its mysteries -- feeling a magnetic ...

Psyche

Trauma and Race

A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 16, 2020 • by Sheldon George

On November 23, 2012, a seventeen-year-old African American boy named Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. During a verbal exchange with Davis over loud music being played by Davis and three friends, the shooter, a forty-seven-year-old white male named Michael Dunn, pulled out ...

Psyche

The Reign of One’s Own Desire

An interview with Sheldon George on his book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 15, 2020 • by Sheldon George and Daniel Gaztambide

Daniel Gaztambide (DG): Would you mind unpacking some of the Lacanian concepts you draw on to understand racism and Black identity, such as jouissance and object a, for a general audience? Sheldon George (SG): Jouissance is often translated from the French as pleasure or enjoyment, but it is most properly an excessive pleasure, a destructive ...

Psyche

Using Psychotherapeutic Dialogues for Healing and Liberation

Chairwork y La Raza

January 9, 2020 • by Amanda Garcia Torres

It was 2013 and I was at my first Chairwork training with my future mentor and colleague Dr. Scott Kellogg, one of the psychologists leading the current renaissance of Chairwork psychotherapy. This experience expanded and changed my beliefs about the possibilities of psychotherapy. In many ways, it has also changed ...

Using Psychotherapeutic Dialogues for Healing and Liberation

Public Health

Flash Count Diary

Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life

October 17, 2019 • by Darcey Steinke

1 Night on Fire 2:11 a.m.: I wake, heart thwacking, as heat flows up from my stomach, courses behind my face, and radiates out through the top of my head. I watch a lamp with a pink shade drift out of my neighbor’s window and hover over my darkened backyard. An hour ...

Feminism

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

An excerpt from the first radical feminist novel

October 7, 2019 • by Alix Kates Shulman

It was always the same story, in subways or suburbs. From my beginnings in Baybury Heights, a nice neighborhood where we moved because it was “safe,” it was always the girl who was kept in the house after school if a boy molested her, never the boy. Ostensibly she was ...