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thebeardedpoet's review against another edition
5.0
Cynthia Cruz has been one of my favorite poets for a few years now. The essays in Disquieting aided me in appreciating what is going on in Cruz's poetry. These essays also helped me to have more empathy for those categorized in our culture as mentally ill. One of the big ideas Cruz puts across is that people are labeled as mentally ill or anorexic, but these are imposed categorizations that are geared toward the end goals of our capitalist culture or neo-liberal values. The labels are used to determine treatment which is influenced by pharmaceutical companies with the end goal of resumed productivity, as our society defines being productive. Cruz's discussion about the La Borde clinic where patients actively participated in running the facility was utterly fascinating to me. The concept there was the creation an environment that was suited for the citizens rather than to exert pressure on them to conform to society's expectations. Really there was too much in this collection of essays to summarize now, but I was also intrigued by Cruz's discussion of how collage, montage, and juxtaposition in art expresses the experience of trauma. That discussion in particular, I think, will inform my re-reading of Cruz's poetry.
lifeinpoetry's review
5.0
Probably my favorite book of the year. As someone who spent most of their teens and twenties cycling in and out of hospitals it's exciting to see an mainstream essay collection that critiques the psychiatric system, classism, neoliberalism, capitalism, and anorexia & trauma & gender.
While Cruz is not trans she acknowledges being nonbinary/trans as having commonality with her experience of gender. I will admit to disappointment that the essay on anorexia and gender referred to anorexics in strictly female terms though I know it's a mental illness often seen in gendered terms.
Felt this:
My desire for a non-gendered body was a wish to exist in this liminal space both literally—between the socially recognized and sanctioned genders—and symbolically—to be able to return to a time when I had what I experienced as a pre-gendered body.
At the same time as I longed for this pre-gendered body, however, I wanted to inhabit the "nothing" of the in-between, the No of gendered being. I had no desire to be androgynous—which seems to me an active coalescing of both genders to the point where one is neither more male nor more female. I didn't want to be either of those; instead, I wanted to exist outside of, or between, those states of being.
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This perfectly describes my disillusionment with how I've been taught to explain my mental health experience:
For more than three decades, I took part in a variety of one-on-one therapies and group therapies. The aim was for me to share what was on my mind or in my life with a therapist who would respond with suggestions or critiques that would help fix me. Struggling with anorexia and anorexic thinking, I would, for instance, say I was fat. More often than not, I was told I was not fat; then the therapist would ask what I really thought, which was a mystifying question. I had just said what I really thought. From my therapist's responses, I eventually came to understand that what I thought—I’m fat—was wrong, that the therapist didn't understand or empathize with me, and that she was growing impatient.
Over the years, I began unconsciously to intuit what the therapist wanted me to say—I would talk, for example, about my specific day-to-day problems, such as what to eat, so the therapist could then feed me the culture's sanctioned solutions to these problems. I want to be clear: I didn't know I was doing this. I had so completely absorbed my many therapists' reactions and responses to me that I had, in a sense, become trained in behaving how they wanted me to behave. Rather than working to discover what was happening below the surface of my reactions, beliefs, and thoughts, and thus gaining access to who I was and then learning to embody this person, I was becoming more and more skilled at intuiting what other people wanted or expected from me and meeting these expectations. What I was learning from my therapists I was also learning from the dominant culture: it was not okay to talk about how I felt about myself and my being in the world.
While Cruz is not trans she acknowledges being nonbinary/trans as having commonality with her experience of gender. I will admit to disappointment that the essay on anorexia and gender referred to anorexics in strictly female terms though I know it's a mental illness often seen in gendered terms.
Felt this:
My desire for a non-gendered body was a wish to exist in this liminal space both literally—between the socially recognized and sanctioned genders—and symbolically—to be able to return to a time when I had what I experienced as a pre-gendered body.
At the same time as I longed for this pre-gendered body, however, I wanted to inhabit the "nothing" of the in-between, the No of gendered being. I had no desire to be androgynous—which seems to me an active coalescing of both genders to the point where one is neither more male nor more female. I didn't want to be either of those; instead, I wanted to exist outside of, or between, those states of being.
-
This perfectly describes my disillusionment with how I've been taught to explain my mental health experience:
For more than three decades, I took part in a variety of one-on-one therapies and group therapies. The aim was for me to share what was on my mind or in my life with a therapist who would respond with suggestions or critiques that would help fix me. Struggling with anorexia and anorexic thinking, I would, for instance, say I was fat. More often than not, I was told I was not fat; then the therapist would ask what I really thought, which was a mystifying question. I had just said what I really thought. From my therapist's responses, I eventually came to understand that what I thought—I’m fat—was wrong, that the therapist didn't understand or empathize with me, and that she was growing impatient.
Over the years, I began unconsciously to intuit what the therapist wanted me to say—I would talk, for example, about my specific day-to-day problems, such as what to eat, so the therapist could then feed me the culture's sanctioned solutions to these problems. I want to be clear: I didn't know I was doing this. I had so completely absorbed my many therapists' reactions and responses to me that I had, in a sense, become trained in behaving how they wanted me to behave. Rather than working to discover what was happening below the surface of my reactions, beliefs, and thoughts, and thus gaining access to who I was and then learning to embody this person, I was becoming more and more skilled at intuiting what other people wanted or expected from me and meeting these expectations. What I was learning from my therapists I was also learning from the dominant culture: it was not okay to talk about how I felt about myself and my being in the world.
glitterdyke's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
i told so many people about this book! it inspired me in my own artistic practice by asking questions about silence, neoliberalism, eating disorders and madness. cruz posits that it is "normal" to be mad in a neoliberal world and talks about how eating disorders are tied to the gendered body. asked questions i ididnt have answers for, answered questions i didnt have the words to ask.
bakalakos's review
informative
medium-paced
4.0
It didn’t have the answers I was looking for, but it was informative and a discussion of capitalism and anorexia I appreciated.
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