The classroom is a space of care, collaboration, and community.
During my time as a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, I created various award-winning teaching initiatives that centre equity, diversity, and inclusivity for queer, trans, disabled, and chronically ill communities.
Dissertation
Touch Me, I’m Sick:
Hysterical Intimacies | Sick Theories
Margeaux Feldman • Doctorate of Philosophy
Department of English • University of Toronto
Abstract
This dissertation develops what I call a “sick theories” approach to the long history of labeling girls, women, and femmes – and their desires – as hysterical, sick, pathological, and in need of a cure. My approach builds on the insight that repressed trauma can lead to chronic illness, which was discovered in the early twentieth century with the emergence of the figure of the hysteric: a girl or woman experiencing inexplicable symptoms, from a persistent cough to full body seizures. Drawing on recent work in trauma studies, I offer a new lens to disability studies by reclaiming the figure of the hysteric, who has been largely neglected in this field. By examining a range of literary and cultural texts, I trace new connections between those who are living with trauma, chronic illness, and pathologized desire, and develop a language for imagining new forms of community and care, which I call “hysterical intimacies.”
Each chapter builds on my sick theories approach, outlined in Chapter One, to analyze a different sick girl. Chapter Two looks at Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones to challenge the state’s narrative that the pregnant Black teen is part of an epidemic and reveal new dimensions of state sponsored anti-Black violence. In recognizing teen pregnancy as endemic new modes of community care, that cross species lines, open up. Chapter Three focuses on Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life and Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia, which depict what I call “ugly sex” – sex that both repulses you and gets you off. In embracing this ambivalence, these women refuse to have their desires pathologized. Chapter Four compares archival photographs of hysterics with Instagram selfies by authors Esmé Weijun Wang and Porochista Khakpour to demonstrate how chronically ill women reimagine communal forms of care that reject the neoliberal valorization of the individual. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how trauma and sickness enable new forms of relationality and community. These “hysterical intimacies” make it possible to show up in a world full of systemic violence with all of our trauma and sickness and imagine better worlds to come.
Special Events
We Need New Stories!
This workshop was created in the wake of another student death by suicide in the fall of 2019. The goal of this workshop is to help TAs, CIs, Instructors, and Faculty navigate how to address these events with their students, and the topic of mental health more broadly. Over the course of three hours we'll unpack some of the fears and myths that keep us from discussing mental health with our students; discuss tangible strategies and best practices for having the conversation; and some ongoing practices that can be integrated into our classrooms to promote mental health. Over 100 educators attended this workshop, including tenured faculty, teaching assistants, course instructors, and administrators.
Fugitive Spaces
Fugitive Spaces was a one day symposium centring undergraduates, graduate students, precariously employed folks who teach, and folks doing feminist/queer/anti-oppressive pedagogies beyond traditional classrooms. This symposium was a response, without apologies or malice, to those places of teaching and learning that work to keep student voices at the margins. What possibilities open up when we recenter the voices and needs of the very students universities are allegedly built around and for, yet continue to devalue and derail? What insights do precariously employed faculty and graduate students bring to these conversations? Where does critical, feminist, and queer teaching exist outside the university classroom? And what lessons do these fugitive spaces, teachers, and learners have to impart on how best to survive the neoliberal university and all the brokenness/possibility that entails? Symposium zine published in MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture’s special issue on feminist pedagogies. Collaborative workshop by Margeaux Feldman and Morgan Bimm was developed into a peer-reviewed article: “Towards a Femme Pedagogy, or Making Space for Trauma in the Classroom.”
Teaching Queerly
“Teaching Queerly,” provided teaching and tenure stream faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students with an opportunity to consider how queer pedagogy speaks to issues of inclusion and equity alongside other frameworks and practices such as decolonization and accessibility. Over the span of three workshops, we explored what learning potentials are opened up by integrating a queer pedagogical approach into one’s teaching, while also grappling with the limitations or challenges of doing so. This series was the winner of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Teaching Stream Pedagogical Grant.
Sick Theories
In Sick Theories, we took up this word “sick” and the ways in which it is different from and/or similar to “ill” or “disabled.” As a word, illness operates to make the realities of sickness more palatable for the neoliberal, capitalist world that depends upon the oppression of the sick body and labels it as unproductive. What does it mean to be sick, as opposed to being ill? What directions might critical disability studies, mad studies, sexual diversity studies, and queer theory take us as we reconsider what it means to be sick? With Sick Theories, we bring together scholars, writers, artists, activists, and educators to untangle the relationships between sickness and sexuality. In this transdisciplinary meeting of folks from varied backgrounds, we emphasize the importance of having people who identify as sick, mad, disabled be the ones leading these conversations. Sick Theories was the recipient of over $10,000 in awards and funding from the University of Toronto. To supplement funding, we launched a successful Go Fund Me campaign of $5000. Featured in GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine.