Reject the stigmas of trauma and chronic illness by fostering queer forms of intimacy—and embracing the many ways humans can care for one another
The writer behind the popular @softcore_trauma Instagram offers a deeply personal memoir for folks seeking healing and better care
The forms of intimacy and care that we’ve been sold are woefully inadequate and problematic. In a world that treats those who are sick and traumatized as problems in need of a cure, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman offers a different story.
Trauma, which all too often manifests as chronic illness, tells us that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in. A world that promotes individualism, fractures us from community through violence and systemic oppression, and leaves us traumatized. That is what we need to cure.
While unveiling their own lived experiences caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness, Feldman provides roadmaps for embracing queer modes of care, or “hysterical intimacies,” that reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Feldman looks at the lengthy history of branding girls, women, and femmes—and their desires—as sick, from the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the 19th and 20th centuries. What emerges is a valiant call for rethinking the ways we seek healing.
This compelling blend of theory, personal narrative, and cultural criticism offers a path forward for reimagining the shapes and forms that intimacy, care, and interdependence can take.
“This book forces readers to look inward at their own intentions and daily manifestations in a world that increasingly promotes carelessness and indifference toward queer culture. This is a fantastic, introspective, thought-provoking collection.”
—Bay Area Reporter
“Tenderly written and courageously conceived, Margeaux Feldman’s Touch Me, I’m Sick is a collection of essays that speaks deeply to readers on the levels of heart, head, and soul. Readers yearning for a vision of social justice that holds complexity and nuance are sure to find refuge in Feldman’s care-filled words. This book is medicine.”
—Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World
“In Touch Me, I’m Sick, Margeaux Feldman explores cultural responses to trauma and illness through a brilliant tapestry of research, criticism, and narrative. At once impressively rigorous and deeply personal, Feldman’s gorgeous debut is a love letter and a guide toward radical care, healing, and belonging.”
—Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme
“For every nonbinary babe and girl who ever felt too much, too unwell, too easily slotted into the role of the hysterical femme, let Touch Me, I’m Sick be your queer feminist guidebook and middle finger to Freud and all the bad patriarchs of Western psychology. Margeaux Feldman gives us a manual for accepting the messiest parts of ourselves, however imperfect, excessive, and perpetually worthy of love.”
—Muriel Leung, author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster
“What might happen if we ‘moved toward the call of touch me, I’m sick’? Margeaux Feldman asks. My answer: a revolution in how we approach healing from trauma. May this book find all its readers: the queer, the sick, the healers, and everyone in need of healing.”
—Wendy C. Ortiz, psychotherapist and author of Excavation: A Memoir
“A stunning antidote to the goofy wellness industry and its ever-shifting but unattainable purity-based health protocols, Touch Me, I’m Sick is an urgent demand for sickness selfies, ugly sex, and an intimacy undiminished—maybe even bolstered—by illness. An achievement.”
—Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
Prelude
Touch Me, I’m Sick
Ambivalent Desires, Ugly Sex
Hysteria’s Ghosts
Femme4Femme Intimacy
Soft Magic
Queer Wounds; or What We Owe Each Other
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
- “Touchable Bodies: A Conversation with the Author of Touch Me, I’m Sick, Margeaux Feldman,” The Prolific Hub Podcast, podcast interview
- “Living Fully in the Body You Have with Margeaux Feldman,” The Feeling Lighter Podcast, podcast interview
- “Softcore Trauma with Margeaux Feldman, Long Distance Transitioning Partner, and Winding Down The Podcast,” Just Between Us, podcast interview
- “The Danger of Weaponizing Our Personal Boundaries,” TIME, original essay
- “Ugly Sex with Margeaux Feldman AKA Softcore Trauma,” ask a sub, podcast interview
- “Fall books roundup 2025 part 2 — Ups & downs: disability determination, D&D gaymers, caregiver crises, food fun & trauma truths,” Bay Area Reporter, included in reading roundup
- “Touch Me, I’m Sick!” Disability Visability Newsletter, giveaway hosted by Alice Wong
- “October Things to Do: Literature,” The Stranger, Seattle 2025 book event announced in “Literature Things to Do” column
- “‘The Many Sick Mothers of My Heart.’ Life at the Intersection of Sickness and Trauma,” Literary Hub, excerpt
Margeaux Feldman’s Touch Me, I’m Sick
Readers’ Guide Discussion Questions
Download the discussion guide.
“The body, it turns out, always knows before the mind is able to reckon.”
—from the Prelude (2)
Synopsis
In a world where trauma often manifests as chronic illness and women, girls, and femmes and their desires are seen as sick, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman provides road maps for embracing queer modes of care, or “hysterical intimacies,” which reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Through this deeply intimate memoir that combines personal narrative, cultural criticism, manifesto, and autotheory, Feldman recounts their traumas—caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness—rethinking the ways we seek healing and intimacy.
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For Discussion
Prelude
Margeaux writes, “The body, it turns out, always knows before the mind is able to reckon.” How do Margeaux’s eczema and Dora’s cough disrupt Freudian understandings of trauma and illness?
Touch Me, I’m Sick
For many women and femmes, sexual assault is riddled with shame, stigma, and blame. Although Dora and Margeaux experienced sexual assault nearly a century apart, both experienced a loss of speech. Why might silence be used as a coping mechanism, and what does it say about how trauma is gendered and pathologized?
Margeaux addresses the ways in which touch has made them sick. How has your perception of sickness and disease changed upon reading this chapter?
What are Margeaux’s central critiques of the medical industrial complex?
What does it mean to embrace the hysteric? What are “hysterical intimacies”?
Margeaux raises the final question: “What might happen if we moved toward the call of touch me, I’m sick?” After reading the chapter, what might this look like, and how does it resonate with your own lived experience?
Ambivalent Desires, Ugly Sex
How does Margeaux define ugliness? What’s their distinction between bad sex and ugly sex?
What role does the feminist movement play in shaping societal conceptions of “good” sex?
How does ambivalence defy binary understandings of ourselves and our desires? How can we use ambivalence as a road map for pleasure?
Hysteria’s Ghosts
Margeaux, talking about “bathtub selfies,” writes, “As we sit alone in our bathtubs, we’re all bathing together. There’s something so beautifully queer and intimate about this.” How does Margeaux frame the act of taking a selfie in relation to others? How do they define a “sickness selfie”?
How do socioeconomic disparities contribute to the social perception of hysteria and trauma, especially for women?
How do baths, both in relation to autonomy and human connection, aid Margeaux in their healing? What power does water have?
Femme4Femme Intimacy
Is pleasure, sexual or otherwise, a privilege? How do social expectations and aspects of your identity inform your answer?
What are the different “parts” Margeaux uses to contextualize their life? Does this method of understanding trauma resonate with you?
What is “Femme4Femme intimacy”? How does this directly link to the idea of “femme temporality”? How has your understanding of these concepts changed after reading this chapter?
Soft Magic
What is the “magic” that Margeaux refers to throughout the chapter? What instances of magic did they showcase, and how might this magic manifest in your life?
Margeaux states that “[s]oftness is a political positioning that rejects the hardness and grittiness of neoliberalism.” How does Margeaux frame softness in relation to society and healing?
What is “soft magic”? How can we use soft magic to navigate the world?
Queer Wounds; or What We Owe Each Other
Margeaux states that we “are never fully sovereign if we choose to be in relation with others.” How do they define sovereignty, or how do they not? How is sovereignty framed within the context of the queer community?
How does individualistic thinking inform the way boundaries are weaponized? What are the consequences of this way of thinking?
How do trauma and harm manifest in a larger societal context? How does shame play into the exacerbation of these manifestations?
Margeaux says time is cyclical, not linear. How does this idea permeate throughout the book? In what ways do they show that healing, in tandem with time, is cyclical?