Autoimmune: A "Medicinal History"

Abstract

In this project, I provide a "medicinal history" (Morales 1998) of my experiences of disability, Madness, and medical abuse, offering a creative format for archiving the past in order to craft healing futures. Weaving stories together with a rag doll index of myself, I craft my own "theory in the flesh," (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015, 19) a counternarrative of resistance to interlocking systems of oppression grounded in my own lived experience as a queer, non-binary, mixed-race, desi, disabled, Mad, femme of color. By tracing white supremacist, colonial, heteropatriarchal, ableist, and saneist violence onto my body, I reimagine the ways that embodied traumas can morph to become possibilities for generative healing praxes. "Autoimmune" is a story of disabled and mad becoming, of the unspooling of the self and ableist/sanist definitions of (dis)ability and madness, and of the "re-storying" (Driskill 2016, 3) of disability and madness through a praxis of kinship.