Touch Me, I'm Sick: A Memoir in Essays by Margeaux Feldman

Join us for a reading, conversation & book-signing with Margeaux Feldman for their memoir in essays, TOUCH ME, I'M SICK. For this event, Feldman will be joined by Lorraine Boissoneault.

The forms of intimacy and care that we’ve been sold are woefully inadequate and problematic. In a world that treats those who are sick and traumatized as problems in need of a cure, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman offers a different story.
Trauma, which all too often manifests as chronic illness, tells us that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in. A world that promotes individualism, fractures us from community through violence and systemic oppression, and leaves us traumatized. That is what we need to cure.
While unveiling their own lived experiences caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness, Feldman provides roadmaps for embracing queer modes of care, or “hysterical intimacies,” that reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Feldman looks at the lengthy history of branding girls, women, and femmes–and their desires–as sick, from the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the 19th and 20th centuries. What emerges is a valiant call for rethinking the ways we seek healing.
This compelling blend of theory, personal narrative, and cultural criticism offers a path forward for reimagining the shapes and forms that intimacy, care, and interdependence can take.

Margeaux Feldman (they/them) is a writer, a public educator, and an artist. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts and a PhD in English Literature and Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto. Their essays have been published in The Sonora Review, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, PRISM, Rabble, and The Ex-Puritan, amongst others. They also run the popular Instagram meme account @softcore_trauma where they write about their experiences living with trauma and chronic illness. They currently live in Los Angeles with their 2 elderly cats. You can learn more about them on their website www.margeauxfeldman.com.

Lorraine Boissoneault is a writer and a journalist covering science, history, travel, and current events. Author of The Last Voyageurs, Boissoneault has previously been a staff writer for Smithsonian Magazine and editor for The Weather Channel. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Playboy Magazine, Catapult, Audubon, Slate, and many other outlets.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other access needs please email .

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