I read this awhile ago and meant to comment sooner but never got all my thoughts together. So here they are, incompletely:

I feel like the last year or two been on that kind of journey and moved a lot in the direction I want to go. I haven’t experienced the same kind of bullshit from doctors and medicine around my body in that way, so there’s probably a lot of different issues involved. But I have had kind of a struggle to feel like I’m starting to feel, in a place where I am more comfortable (and less self-critical) with my sexuality and figuring out how to negotiate it with other people and feel good about it (and by negotiate I mean hooking up with people - when it comes to talking, I usually have a pretty big mouth and have lots of discussions about sex with good friends that I don’t have sexual relationships with). I guess that struggle has partly to do with more mainstream feminist figuring out how to own my body and what I do or don’t want (with myself and with other people), partly with gender/sexuality stuff and feeling uncomfortable with some roles I’m expected to play, and a lot with just not having orgasms or pleasure (which may or may not be related to my diabetes) in the same way young people are “expected” to and that most of my friends and sexual partners have

Obviously I don’t have “Answers”, and I think we are coming from different places/experiences. Maybe your question at the end of the post was rhetorical. But I guess if you are looking for ideas, things that I am finding helpful to me include therapy (with a good therapist who is straight but queer friendly and generally open/ not into pushing towards “norms”), time and space to think and explore, resources & equipment & books/articles from a good queer/feminist sex store, and a good, laid-back, supportive queer friend with benefits. When I was really frustrated and feeling more trapped and trying to figure out what to do a couple years ago, I didn’t get anywhere. I had stopped trying for a while and then those started to fall in place.

Shiva, it is not your place to decide whether or not I am a true friend to sanabituranima. It’s her place. She’s not quite oppressed and brainwashed enough to need a total stranger on the Internet to assess her situation and vet her friends for her.

I do have her permission to post explanations of her condition on people’s blogs, if she has been seeking out triggering material deliberately and has said things that do not represent her viewpoint. I have clear instructions on this one. SA has also contacted me in the past to ask me to e-mail blog owners privately to explain things, as she struggles to express herself at times and doesn’t particularly enjoy hurting people. This time she wanted readers who had been upset by her remarks to understand them as well.

She can’t always articulate them verbally, but she knows exactly what her own opinions are and she stands by those opinions. She does not consider the thoughts that she has when she is experiencing a psychotic episode as representative of herself. To you, trying to amputate your own leg because you believe that you will go to hell if you don’t do it might qualify as a ’strange opinion’ that ought to be treated as valid. So might e-mailing a blogger that you’ve never met to accuse her of hating you and reading your mind. To SA, these aren’t alarming and objectionable opinions that she just so happens to hold. To her, they are symptoms of a very distressing illness. She asks the people she encounters to make a distinction between her opinions and her symptoms.

I can tell from your comment that you do not believe that ‘psychosis’ really exists. You are entitled to your opinion, and I am entitled to mine. My opinion is that while people bandy around ultra-politicised, super-radical, oh-so-intellectual ideas about how psychosis is just a concept invented by the psychiatric community, who are engaged in a disabling conspiracy to Keep Us Down, one of my closest friends is suffering from terrifying thoughts that make her want to kill herself and hurt other people, among other things. That’s real all right.

I don’t have ownership of SA’s thoughts or her opinions. I do have a long friendship with her that extends to before the time her illness began. I do have instructions on what she does and doesn’t want me to do. I do have her trust.

If you care to know what she thinks about the view that ‘psychosis’ has no effect on her thought processes or is an outright fabrication, she has a piece called ‘Everything I Needed to Know About Psychiatry I Learned from the Internet’ that you might find interesting:

http://sanabituranima.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/everything-i-needed-to-know-about-psychiatry-i-learned-from-the-internet/

I’m struck by how much your reclamation of your own body is so similar to the queer fight to reclaim queer bodies. It reminds me of Robert McRuer’s book “Crip Theory”… I know I talk about that book a lot, but it changed the way I look at the world. And I have a technically “abled” body, though queer in many ways. And I often feel like my body is not my own. especially with recent medical issues… my doctors looking at me funny when I ask about simple side effects of medications - I’ve seriously been told “If I told you all the side effects, you wouldn’t take it” right before a needle hits my arm and hurts. 3 weeks later, I wound up being diagnosed with a pretty serious condition called pseudotumor cerebri, which very well could have been, at least in part, due to the fact that I was shot in the arm with steroids and not given permission to question.

It is really hard to demand respect from the medical-industrial complex, but I’m finding ways to talk to my docs. My neuro-ophthalmologist seems incredibly willing to listen when I can pin him to his chair and force it on him. His nurses are much more willing, and as stereotypical as this sounds, I’m beginning to think female docs are just more willing to be holistically caring for patients.

I don’t know a strategy for *how* to reclaim one’s body… but for me it’s been a daily struggle and I still don’t feel like I own it. I often feel disoriented and disconnected from my body, but I’ve found that some very physical sensations bring the orientation back. Like pinching myself hard or accidentally scalding myself in the sink. I’m not much of a masochist, but sometimes physical sensations bring me back and remind me that just because I occupy this body, I own it… and sometimes it’s laughter that reminds me - the really good kind that starts deep in my belly.

I’ll stop rambling in your comments… I should probably use my own blog for that…

TPQ

You inspired a post by me… I have to mention that I wrote it thinking of your own posting. Hope you like this or that it helps you in some way.
Paula Apodaca

we met at the t-shirt transformation in Pembroke, NCmy response was kinda long so i wrote you an open letter.

love,
zach

ps. please, anyone interested check out lex’s brilliant collective reading project, currently discussing Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger.”

http://summerofourlorde.wordpress.com/discussion-session-i-uses-of-anger/

we met at the t-shirt transformation in NC. i’m feeling the post and your deft moderation. re:do we own our bodies? well, I have been trying to own mine, or at least hold it for a little while. the problem however, is that there are constant thefts, disruptive interventions which won’t allow me to hold me (a poor, queer, rural, black woman, with no health insurance, clothed, fed and educated with the help of state/federal aid) together. reading your post ran a litany of experiences through my mind, my daily experiences of wrestling skin
and bones
and hair
and sight
and womb
and blood
and touch
and creativity
and memory
and sisterhood
back
from whoever might have them on loan, or whoever was using the word “debt” or “invitation” or “productivity” or “paycheck” to make believe i never owned them in the first place. and so, i can’t help but be reminded of the connection between this question of ownership and privilege. of the appropriation of knowledge systems that reject selfish ownership and capital, only to retrofit them out of context to “greater good rhetoric” that still serves oppressive power structures. this too is violence.

i think it’s interesting that the people who are often the first to call for this “radicalization/sublimation” of selfhood, the most enthusiastic supporters of burying the hatchet and forgetting damage already done, are the most adept thieves, having practiced ownership of other things so well for so long. perhaps they don’t see how absurd it is for them now to attempt to control the discourse around the greater good and obfuscate the issue of accountability. i am angered at all attempts to disrupt, silence, and neutralize the ways womyn/disabled people/queers/people of color/3rd world people go about the recovering what has been taken.

what does a conversation about this look like when controlled by the people i named above? are their useful definitions that these people have laid down, already are laying down that don’t mimic the violences of enslavement, surveillance, imprisonment, exclusion, isolation, and death? is their ownership/self ownership that make love and justice more possible? those are my questions

re anger and bravery:

the appropriateness of all the conversations radical women of color have been having about their anger and how it still useful tool is a theme that has run through many recent conversations with brilliant women of color in my community. our anger at injustice is not destructive. it is not useless or counteractive.

please check out lex’s brilliant blogging project exploring audre lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger”

http://summerofourlorde.wordpress.com/discussion-session-i-uses-of-anger/

love,
zach

It’s probably one of the most patronising, agency-denying, and therefore frankly oppressive things i’ve ever seen said about anyone by a so-called “friend” - not even to mention the disclosing of huge amounts of extremely personal information about someone without that person’s consent to it…

To dismiss someone’s views, however strange, false or objectionable those views may be, as “not really their views” on the grounds of being a product of “psychosis” is IMO one of the most crushing and violating things it’s possible to do to a person (and a perfect example of medical denial of self-ownership).

I can, however, understand how a person who has been denied self-ownership all hir life, to the point of institutionalisation, can end up not believing in self-ownership at all, or even seeing lack of self-ownership as a “virtuous” thing (a form of internalised oppression, or what Nietzsche called “slave morality”). This gives me more empathy for sanabituranima, but does not, IMO, make hir views any less wrong…