Let’s begin with the important questions. I am, among other things, a writer, a reader, an anthropologist, a student, a teacher, a partner, an ally, an advocate. Those are the identities that matter most to what I want to do with this blog, but I’m also a hesitant yogi (mostly because I know you’re judging me for being so New Agey in your head right now), a very amateur photographer, and an aspiring polyglot. I come from a barrier island in Eastern NC and I work in Washington, D.C., en la boca de la bestia.
The next question is inevitably, what am I doing here? I’m in my final year of graduate coursework (!!) and I’ve been facing the toughest physical stress on my body in my lifetime. Anxiety is ramping up my heart rate and stopping my digestive system, and sometimes I can’t tell if it’s the pain or the depression that keeps me in bed. I keep working, but I’ve had to cut great losses and I’m still living week-to-week on my expectations, ready for the inevitable slip at any moment. Because I “look fine,” I have really struggled to communicate my limited faculties to my professors. I love my work, but this has been an awful dynamic; considering my intellectual focus on medical anthropology, it is also a painfully ironic one.
So I’ve decided to blend my reflective and analytic skills to link the structural factors behind my own embodied suffering to my personal experience as I navigate academia telling these big picture stories. They matter to me at all scales. Medical anthropology has offered me terms and lenses for understanding how social difference is inscribed upon the body, and reading each reinforcing case gives me the confidence to speak my own truth—and hopefully inspire someone else to join our voices, as well. What follows are ethnographic notes as I move through loci of power (the state, the university) as a feminist looking to intersectionality and decolonialism as foundations for subversion.
skeptiki 