"the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity."

eve kosofsky sedgwick, touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. see also and here. oh, if i look at the dates i know why i posted this twice.  

"somatic language speaks in metonymy…integrates mind and body…talks back…it is spoken in the second person and in the imperative; it implicates the viewer in performances where the body is shared…[it] begins with unbinding one’s mouth."

jane blocker, what the body cost: desire, history, and performance 

"you want hysteria? i’ll give you hysteria."

karen finley, a certain level of denial

"a hysterical woman is a woman who has lost a sense of the boundaries between sign and signified—the supposedly arbitrary signifier and the supposedly distanced signified lose both their mark of randomness and their distance as they are collapsed onto the space of her body…in the logic of hysteria, all things mark."

rebecca schneider, the explicit body in performance 

a conversation at the hospital

"as a woman living among the signifying practices of men, i am familiar with the politics of the process by which the woman’s pain went unspoken and was made intelligible as what it was not."

jo-anna isaak, “our mother tongue: the post-partum document“