Psychosomatic Futurities: Cripping the Future of Cultural Psychiatry in a Posthuman Landscape

This paper explores the ways in which cultural psychiatry can contribute to the understanding of the larger culture of medicine, through critical engagements with dualisms that structure medicine's curative imaginary-a social imaginary that positions disability as a deviation, a tragedy, and a problem to be solved. Developed as an experimental form of image/text analysis from a sensory ethnographic study of solid organ transplantation and drawing on ethnographic interviews, art workshops, and visual fieldnotes, our analysis tracks the bifurcated logic of cure through vignettes and fragments, building a larger visual and text-based narrative that engages crip technoscience as a means of reconsidering emotional distress and psychosocial challenges of transplantation. Transplantation offers a space to critically engage with the persistence of dualisms in medicine and psychiatry, complicating divisions and boundaries between sickness/health, before/after, mind/body, self/other. We see the enforcement and reinforcement of binary logics, and at the same time these are undone within the tempo and textures of the field when we attend to it through sensory and affective modes of study. Artistic practices and stories told as fragments and gestures rather than linear narratives can build upon one another, scaffolded to offer a different way of viewing dominant motifs in the culture of medicine, which offer different possible futures for thriving in/with disability.