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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