Sick

Another kind of crazy-making death-in-life is is living with the knowledge that you have tried to kill yourself, as Natasha Lennard writes in “On Suicide.” Questions of intent are necessarily hazy in this act, which confounds the subject-object split so beloved of philosophy, but that doesn’t make any easier to put to rest. Trying to die, but in a state that means you can’t really mean it, means you’ll struggle with coming to terms even with your failure—if there even are terms to come to.

Evan Calder Williams writes of the experience of diabetes as a transformation of your body into a siphon through which the world pours itself. Throughout history, diabetes has been understood through its liquids—insulin, urine, blood that must be constantly drawn and read.  Diabetes is the condition of no longer being able to take what’s supposed to be good for you, but it forms subjects whose existence depends on the same circuits of production that made them sick from the start. Trapped between refusal and fidelity, of course they are targets of shame.

In “Weight Gains,” Willie Osterweil examines the equally shame-ridden problem of obesity, though its medical status isn’t nearly as stable as diabetes. Instead, he finds it to be a product of capitalist agriculture’s need to find a place to store its glut, which it resolves (as always) with the bodies of workers. If anything about obesity is a sickness, he writes, its that the global food market is structured precisely like an eating disorder, sending consumers spinning from diet pill to subsidized corn.

In “Taking Shit From Others,” Janani Balasubramanian writes of that most shameful substance, shit, and the miraculous cures it promises, if only the FDA would get past its squeamishness and let a thousand transplanted microbiomes bloom. Fecal transfer is an age-old remedy, but only recently are MIT grads with biotech venture capital turning shit into gold.

Yahdon Israel takes a serious look at the racial ramifications of cooties, turning the playground malady into a lens through which to examine the level of light required for passing a black body as a white one. The origins of the “disease” lie with post-war fears of polio, when suburban parents tried to protect their children from an unseeable threat that looked just like them. But the lessons that it bears for black children trying to understand how the world sees them as a threat are illuminating.

In “Who Cares,” Laura Ann Robertson writes of the gendered infrastructure of care work, reading her job as a nurse in a mental health-care facility through feminist theories of the relation between gender and labor. Are care and love as we understand them now essentially human or are they just another pretext for capitalist exploitation? Even while love remains under the sign of money, paid care work is incentivized with appeals to love. And Anne Boyer writes of breast cancer as a uniquely destructive force in women’s intellectual history. Women who write their experience of it arrive at the central difficulty of being a woman: the self is somewhere other than the body, as if fleeing from the pain of a disease. If women do not die for each other, she writes, they die of being women.

In our reviews section, Derek Ayeh assesses Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, recently a presidential pick for the First Daughters. American medicine fails the dying, he writes, and makes examples of deliberately chosen death, like Brittany Maynard’s, appear as relief from industrially-extended sickness. He finds Gawande’s critique of medicalized death to be compelling, and even more, his recommendations of what doctors should do instead to be practically and applicable advice.

Reviewing Eula Biss’s new book On Immunity, Sara Black McCulloch finds that the divisions immunity relies on (host, body; sick, well) has given rise to a whole host of sick programs: eugenics, miscegenation laws, and forced sterilization of genetically “undesirable” mothers.

Illness is either rebellion or submission, our bodies rejecting a foreign pathogen or succumbing to a weakness in our defenses. Examination can’t always diagnose, but perhaps it can prompt healing.