door: Paulina Trejo Mendez
I have been diagnosed with a chronic illness. From a biomedical perspective this implies there is not a cure. This made me question what could be healed? This also meant questioning the medical gaze that looked at me without seeing me. Experiencing medical interventions has allowed me to understand the pain of being reduced to anatomy, the body as an object of interventions, as a machine. This can be a dehumanizing experience, one that those who have been racialized or dehumanized in other ways may relate to. In my academic and artistic work, I have explored this dominant gaze while looking for ways to heal from the fragmentation it causes.

Many of our wounds, even if experienced personally in our bodies, are also coming from the ways in which we have learned to relate to ourselves, the environment, and each other. I am interested in how we can make healing a collective path. I believe finding creative ways of changing these relations collectively, would be a subversive act that centers our healing in societies that often neglect care, love, and life. One of the things I want to emphasize is that we are not only our wounds or the pain that has marked us, but the love, care, and joy that we have experienced, everything that has nourished us in some way. Remembering that, is in my view, what allows healing.

As a researcher doing a PhD on Development Studies, I was confronted with my role in reproducing this dominant gaze through research. My own experiences made me wonder whether we could separate this dominant gaze from the domination of specific bodies… particularly the bodies of people who had been dehumanized through the imposition of gender and race. This led me to search for decolonial methodologies that would delink from the dominant ways of engaging with knowledge within Academia.

For those of us who deal with chronic pain or illness, it is evident that we need a community of care, that we need each other not only to survive, but to thrive. In my understanding that includes not only people, but other beings. From a Comunitario feminism that has indigenous roots in Guatemala, I have learnt the importance of building community wherever we are. Maya feminist Lorena Cabnal speaks of bodies being part of territory (nature) not separate. This is what “body-territory-earth” means. I find her ideas about healing as a political path inspiring. Lorena reminds that “healing is a personal and political act that adds to the web of life” and adds that “struggles require the healing of the bodies that experienced multiple forms of oppression”(Lorena Cabnal 2016)[1].

 One of the symptoms I deal with is inflammation. Professor of medicine Rupa Marya and research professor Raj Patel (2021) speak of a world that is “inflamed”. They mention “inflammation is systemic, and the systems are linked” making the point that the environment social, political, economic… pollution, it all affects our health (Marya & Patel, 2021). This means that the systems of oppression that mark our bodies in unequal societies also have an impact on our health. However, inflammation is a response in a body trying to heal itself, a body that has perceived a threat, when the reaction is persistent and inflammation chronic, that is when it becomes a problem (ibid).

What needs healing? Can we envision a world that heals? What would this look like? I share these questions as an invitation to reflect on healing and what it may mean to each one of us on the individual and collective level. My hope is that we can create the world we need where care and life are at the center. I like to imagine that in such a world there is no systemic inflammation, the symptom of an overheated “body-territory-earth”. This is because our relations will transform by prioritizing life in all its forms. As well as by the collective awareness that we need each other.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14747731.2021.2009306

References

• Cabnal, Lorena. (2016). Entrevista Lorena Cabnal en Red de sanadoras ancestrales del feminismo comunitario en Guatemala.Voces de mujeres, historias que transforman. Accessed on 10-01-2023: www.youtube.com/watch
• Cabnal, Lorena. (2019). El relato de las violencias desde mi territorio cuerpo-tierra. In X. Leyva & R. Icaza (Eds.), En Tiempos de muerte cuerpos, rebeldias, resictencias. (pp. 113–123). Cooperativa Editorial Retos.
• Marya, Rupa, & Patel, Raja. (2021). Inflamed, deep medicine and the anatomy of injustice. London: Allen Lane.

[1] Personal translation from Spanish to english.