I was invited by the Basler Chair of Excellence at East Tennessee State University to lead a workshop in the Rehearsing Care Lab. This workshop, “Speculative Sutured Selves” brought together participants from across ETSU to transform the language of medical journals, diagnosis, and diagnostic handbooks into a speculative poetics of the self. Utilizing a disability studies grounding that relies on holistic bodymind engagement (refusing a Cartesean “cut” between the thinking and sensing self), I stewarded participants through a series of exercises that cut into personal medical records, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), and other documents on diagnosis to reimagine how we might redefine ourselves and imagine our futures from the language we have on hand.
In the workshop, a group of Clinical Psychology graduate students took turns cutting passages from the DSM-5-TR to create poems questioning the process of diagnosis and to meditate on how they might “replace order with nature in the ‘field’ of psychology.”
Some participants offered their work to be included in the coming third volume of the Buzz-Zine.
Jessica Suzanne Stokes 