Locating Sickness: Disability, Queerness, and Race in a Memoir

Abstract

This paper re-reads Sick: A Memoir (2018) by Porochista Khakpour, as a transnational feminist and queer text, to investigate how the author locates her disability and queerness with the diaspora, homelessness, and rise of governmental violence. Through the lens of feminist and disability studies, Sick can be read as an outstanding narrative of the queerness, disability, in-between-ness, and of course, resistance of a queer and disabled woman of color. The paper argues that Khakpour’s story should be regarded as an attempt to write complexities of intersectional and multi-layered identities that challenge the discourses of detection and diagnosis; criticize the politics of race among the community of Iranian-diaspora and in America; and highlight the role of home, belonging, and the feeling of homelessness caused by state policies of nation-building and exclusion. Further, Khakpour proposes a new guideline for feminist geography that accommodates female, queer, disabled, and diasporic Iranian-American bodies on the expanding map of excluded and erased subjects.