Wade Sikorski

Infected with Difference: Healing Dis / Ease in the Body Politic Wade Sikorski

According to modern medicine, disease is an accident, an effect of bacteria, viruses, toxins, and genes. It has no meaning outside a science of the body's machinery. Infected with Difference: Healing Dis/ease in the Body Politic argues in contrast that disease is often dis/ease, a meaningful expression of the self's entanglement in systems of power, exclusion, and hierarchy. And so, healing disease depends not just upon changing the body's biochemistry, but upon politicizing at least some aspects of the world the self is implicated in.
The images, metaphors, thoughts, and feelings that constitute and enable the immune system's response to the world are not just personal, but intersubjective and transpersonal, an effect of language, culture, tradition, and systems of power. If the individual's body is diseased, there is something dis/easing about the world it is in, and so it must be called into question, politicized, before the individual can be healed. Healing the body means healing the world.