Mad Insight

Abstract

This poem is informed by the relationships between gender, race, chronic pain, hysteria, and the role of dominant discourses in shaping interpretations of bodily and psychic pain. Drawing on my lived experience as a non-binary person with chronic vulvar pain, or vulvodynia, I challenge the psychiatrization of chronic pain and propose hysteria as a potential state of resistance and refusal (Dumaresque, 2019). I weave fog throughout this poem as a metaphor that captures pain, madness, and perception. Fog symbolizes disruption and disorientation; yet, fog also gestures to the potentiality of being displaced from normative insight (Bruce, 2017). I engage William Connolly’s (2010) reading of perception as formed through discipline to think through the silent but subversive waves of knowledge and power that carve the lenses through which we story ourselves and others (Erickson, 2016). As Thomas King (2003) writes, “the truth about stories is that’s all we are” (p. 32). This poem is situated in a reading of madness and hysteria as sites of affective protest (Dumaresque, 2019). I ask, what can be resourced from our becoming un-hinged? This poem contributes to mad knowledge that is intersectional and in-service to disrupting medical and psychiatric violence, whiteness, hetero/cis-governance, and “compulsory able-bodymindedness” (Sheppard, 2018, p. 59).