"May this book find all its readers: the queer, the sick, the healers, and everyone in need of healing." —Wendy C. Ortiz
Third Place Books welcomes author, artist, and public educator Margeaux Feldman to our Seward Park store for a conversation about their new book, Touch Me, I'm Sick—a memoir in essays focused on trauma, care, and intimacy that calls readers to rethink the ways we seek healing.
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This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
About Touch Me, I'm Sick. . .
Reject the stigmas of trauma and chronic illness by fostering queer forms of intimacy—and embracing the many ways humans can care for one another.
The writer behind the popular @softcore_trauma Instagram offers a deeply personal memoir for folks seeking healing and better care.
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.
Praise for Touch Me, I'm Sick. . .
“For every nonbinary babe and girl who ever felt too much, too unwell, too easily slotted into the role of the hysterical femme, let Touch Me, I’m Sick be your queer feminist guidebook and middle finger to Freud and all the bad patriarchs of Western psychology. An impeccably wise memoir that skillfully joins the heartbreaking lessons of author Margeaux Feldman’s life as a parentified child and constant caregiver with some of the most urgent conversations about disability justice, trauma studies, and pleasure activism happening today; they give us a manual for accepting the messiest parts of ourselves, however imperfect, excessive, and perpetually worthy of love.”
—Muriel Leung, author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster
“Tenderly written and courageously conceived, Margeaux Feldman’s Touch Me, I’m Sick is a collection of essays that speaks deeply to readers on the levels of heart, head, and soul. Feldman gracefully interweaves intimate storytelling with deep intellectual analysis, spinning together the threads of personal narrative, disability justice, psychology and trauma theory, and transformative justice to make a unique contribution to the lineage of queer and trans cultural work. Readers yearning for a vision of social justice that holds complexity and nuance are sure to find refuge in Feldman’s care-filled words. This book is medicine.”
—Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World
“A stunning antidote to the goofy wellness industry and its ever-shifting but unattainable purity-based health protocols, Touch Me, I’m Sick is an urgent (at least for the always already ill) demand for sickness selfies, ugly sex, and an intimacy undiminished—maybe even bolstered—by illness. An achievement.”
—Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
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.
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