d) More like Antoni-NO

Henricks, 10—J. Earl Danieley Professor of Sociology and Distinguished

University Professor at Elon University (Thomas, “Caillois’s Man, Play,
and Games,” American Journal of Play Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2010,
dml)
The third
Both of these forms described allow people to continue being themselves, albeit in new (perfected) settings.

form of games, mimicry, is quite different. There, the player tries to “escape himself
[themselves] and become another.” Caillois’s chooses his terminology intentionally for he wishes to
remind readers of “mimetism, notably of insects, so that the fundamental, elementary, and quasi-organic nature of the
impulse that stimulates it can be stressed.” Caillois sought to discover the prehuman foundations of our playful impulses.
He was fascinated by the ways in which certain species camouflage themselves or even assume the appearance of another
species. In humans, masking serves a similar purpose, “to change the viewer’s appearance and to inspire fear in others”
(2001b, 20).

humans can control their disguises. They understand that what

Unlike animals,

they are doing is a contrivance. A reveler at a carnival does not believe that
she is in fact a dragon; a child’s playing at cowboy is only make-believe.
And the motivation shifts somewhat from the inspiration of fear in others
to the pleasure that “lies in being or passing for another.” Again, the
player does not try to become entirely the person or creature that she
performs; nor does she expect to convince others that she is really a
locomotive or a toreador. To this degree, playful make-believe in the contemporary world is
a somewhat softened version of the ritual enactments of traditional societies.
 Berlant Kritik

11. Mental health suffering reps is good

Tristan 11/4/2017. Gabrielle, “The importance of mental health
discussion.” Staff writer at the Houstonian.
http://houstonianonline.com/2017/10/31/importance-mental-health-
discussion/.
The importance of mental health discussion
During the course of 2017, there are many issues that have been brought to
light and have made the world stop and think. The issue of mental health
has become a big topic in the media. From internet videos, message
boards, and blogs, people have begun to discuss their own mental health
issues in hopes to either help other people or bring more attention to
conditions, such as anxiety and depression. One in four people around the
world suffer from some sort of mental illness. Many people, including
celebrities, have begun to open up about their battles with mental health
and the difficulties that come with it. But if so many people have a
condition, such as depression or anxiety, then why is it still considered a
topic better left in the dark? While mental illness covers a wide variety of
issues, such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, and even eating disorders, one
that has become a hot topic and has been getting the most attention is
depression.
But there is something that has gotten under my skin for a while now.
Regular people have suffered with depression for a long time, but nobody
would talk about it. I wonder why people began to care when celebrities
started coming out and discussing their battle with anxiety, depression,
and mental health in general, and they are seen as brave, heroes even. Yes,
they are brave for talking about their issues, especially in the public eye.
However, I still do not understand why people begin to care when a
famous person brings light to the subject. After Chester Bennington’s
suicide, the world almost stopped and thought, “Wow, this is a real
problem.” They began to realize people are hiding their suffering and
began encouraging people to talk to someone. It just confuses me that it
took a well-loved singer who was able to connect with people so well for it
to become a real problem, and not just mental.
For a long time, people who suffered from depression were placed in
mental asylums with people thinking they had a disorder along the same
lines as schizophrenia. While over time the idea of depression has gotten
easier to understand and it has gotten easier for people to seek out help,
there are still people in the world that think it is a false problem. They
think the person is doing it to themselves and that the problem is just in
their head. I have heard people say, “Just be happy…it’s not that hard” or
“Get over it and quit crying about it.” It can make seeking any help
difficult. So many people suffer with it alone, which will only amplify the
problem. It’s heartbreaking. It’s not something that goes away like a cold
or a bruise. There is nothing wrong with seeking out help. Seeking out
help from either a doctor, family, friends, or even calling a hotline can help
more than you think. There are hundreds of websites, phone numbers, and
people in the world that can help anyone who is suffering. And while it is
hard to finally admit that you cannot handle it anymore, seeking out some
form of help will be worth it in the long run.

12. Psychoanalysis is nonfalsifiable – takes out cruel optimism.

Robinson ’04 (Andrew, Political Theorist and Activist, “The Politics of the
Lack,” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, Volume 6,
Issue 2, pp. 259–269, May, 2004)
, since
As should by now be clear, the central claims of Lacanian theory are ontological rather than political. Indeed

Lacan’s work deals with politics only very occasionally, the entire project
of using Lacan politically is fraught with hazards. With rare exceptions, Lacanian
theorists put ontology in the driving seat, allowing it to guide their
political theorising. Political discourse and events are subsumed into a
prior theoretical framework in a manner more reminiscent of an attempt to
confirm already-accepted assumptions than of an attempt to assess the
theory itself. Among the authors discussed here, Zizek takes this the furthest: the stuff of theory is ‘notions’,
which have a reality above and beyond any referent, so that, if reality does not conform to the notions, it is ‘so much the
worse for reality’ (in Butler, Laclau and Zizek 2000, 244).
The selection and interpretation of examples, whether in concrete analysis
of political discourse or in theoretical exegesis, is often selective in a way
which appears to confirm the general theory only because inconvenient
counterexamples are ignored. The entire edifice often appears wholly a priori
and non-falsifiable, and the case for its acceptance is extremely vague.
Most often, the imperative to adopt a Lacanian as opposed to (say) a Rawlsian or an
orthodox Marxist approach is couched in terms of dogmatically-posited demands that

one accept the idea of constitutive lack. A failure to do so is simply

denounced as ‘shirking’, ‘blindness’, ‘inability to accept’ and so on. In this
way, Lacanian theory renders itself almost immune to analytical critique
on terms it would find acceptable. Furthermore, a slippage frequently
emerges between the external ‘acceptance’ of antagonism and its subjective
encouragement. For instance, Ernesto Laclau calls for a ‘symbolisation of
impossibility as such as a positive value’ (in Butler, Laclau and Zizek 2000, 1999, original
emphasis).

The differences between the texts under review mainly arise around the
issue of how to articulate Lacanian themes into a concrete political
discourse. This becomes especially clear in the Butler, Laclau and Zizek volume from which the above quotation is
taken. Laclau and Zizek share a theoretical vocabulary and agree on a number of issues of basic ontology. However, they
both—and each in an equally dogmatic way—insist on a particular decontestation of this vocabulary in their analysis of
contemporary events. For Laclau, Lacanian analysis dovetails with ‘radical democracy’, whereas for Zizek, it entails a
radical refusal of the status quo from a standpoint cross-fertilised with insights from Hegel, Kant and the Marxist
tradition. This disagreement represents a broader split of Lacanian theorists into two camps: ‘radical democrats’ who
follow Laclau’s line that liberal democracy is a realisation of the Lacanian model through the acceptance of antagonism
and its conversion into symbolically accepted electoral and interest-group competition, and more-or-less nihilistic
Lacanians such as Zizek and Badiou who maintain that a Lacanian politics requires a radical break with the present
political system.

Butler, for her part, is not sufficiently committed to an ontology of lack to accept the other protagonists’ inability to
She calls Lacanian theory a ‘theoretical
provide substantial argumentation for their positions.

fetish’, because the ‘theory is applied to its examples’, as if ‘already true,

prior to its exemplification’. Articulated on its own self-sufficiency, it shifts
its basis to concrete matters only for pedagogical purposes (in Butler, Laclau and
Ziek 2000, 26–27). She suggests, quite accurately, that the Lacanian project is in a

certain sense ‘a theological project’, and that its heavy reliance on a priori
assumptions impedes its ability to engage with practical political issues,
using simplification and a priori reasoning to ‘avoid the rather messy
psychic and social entanglement’ involved in studying specific political
cases (ibid., 155–156). She could perhaps have added that, in practice, the switch between ontology and politics is
usually accomplished by the transmutation of single instances into universal facts by means of a liberal deployment of
words such as ‘always’, ‘all’, ‘never’ and ‘necessity’; it is by this specific discursive move that
the short-circuit between ‘theology’ and politics is achieved. Butler
questions the political motivations involved in such practices. ‘Are we
using the categories to understand the phenomena, or marshalling the
phenomena to shore up the categories “in the name of the father” [i.e. the
master-signifier]?’ (ibid., 152).

Aside from the absence of any

The problems raised by Butler are serious, and reflect a deeper malaise.

significant support for their basic ontological claims, the two Lacanian
camps both face enormous problems once they attempt to specify their
political agendas. For the Laclauians, the greatest difficulty is that of maintaining a ‘critical’ position even
while endorsing assumptions remarkably close to those of the analytical-liberal mainstream. The claim that

liberal democracy is necessary to take the bite out of intractable conflicts

arising from human nature, and the resultant condemnation of ‘utopian’
theories such as Marxism for ungrounded optimism and resultant
totalitarian dangers, is hardly original. To take one example, it arises in Rawls’ discussion of
‘reasonable pluralism’ and the ‘burdens of difference’ in Political Liberalism (1996, Lecture 2 and passim). Since much of
the appeal of Lacanian theory depends on its claims to be offering a new, radical approach to politics, such similarities
must be downplayed.

This becomes clear on readingMouffe’s latest book, The Democratic Paradox. This work
shows the absence of significant changes in the basic positions rehearsed in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) and reasserted in The Return of the
Political (Mouffe 1993). Like the latter volume, her new book consists (aside from various

exegetical appropriations) mostly of attempts to distance herself from various

analytical liberals, ‘Third Way’ theorists and deliberative democrats (including Jürgen Habermas, Seyla
Benhabib, Charles Larmore, Anthony Giddens and Joshua Cohen), and to argue for a Lacanian

rather than a deliberative or analytical reading of liberal democracy. Her

similarities with her opponents’ concrete politics means that this
distancing is as often as not simply a matter of Mouffe’s insistence on a
particular analytical terminology.

13. Acceding to Psychoanalysis links to our ethics thesis

Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, professor of Women’s and gender
studies at Ohio State University, Queering Freedom, pg. 76
Lacan’s accounts of ego-formation capture the
Functioning within an ontology of contained space,

dilemma of intersubjectivity endemic to the model of liberal

individualism. While Lacan points toward the dynamics of rec- ognition and their self-splitting as necessary and constitutive
of ego- formation, the fundamental autonomy of the liberal individual remains the
desired telos of all development. The fundamental criterion of one’s social
legibility remains one’s demarcation from all others and the social world
itself. Driven by the dynamics of narcissism, the kind of recognition that Lacan idealizes
remains one that is grounded in a self that is ontologically separable from
all other entities. Cynthia Willett diagnoses this dilemma as the struggle between the two dominant models of human
the liberal subject “who defines
subjectivity in western cultures since the Enlightenment:

itself through active self-agency or possessive self-ownership

and claims . . . the right to protect a private space” and “the (post-
Hegelian) subject who discovers who he is through the recognition
bestowed upon him by other persons” (2001, 6). As Willett also argues, these remain two
sides of the same coin: each of these models of subjectivity
assumes that separability from others and the social world
constitutes the fundamental endpoint of all desires. Utter self-
sufficiency, achieved either through will power or through transcending the recognition of others , is what humans
must ultimately seek according to both of these models. Both of these models,
Locke’s liberal individual and Lacan’s authoritative ego, operate within
an economy of scarcity that is grounded in a model of desire
that can never find any external satisfaction. Both models are driven
by lack, which each thinker conceives as the ontological condition of
humans, and which develops further into an explicitly aggressive drive in
Lacan’s accounts. Furthermore, in Lacan’s accounts, the symbolic cannot function without
sufficient distance between and delineation of singular entities: bodies
must be separate and distinct for one to call out the narcissistically
cathected aggression against and toward the other. Relations
between selves on both of these models subsequently function
through protective gestures that must be repeated constantly.
Standing out into the ontologically empty space of this aggressive and
threatening social scene, one must mark one’s territory and
construct strong and clear borders around it. The self becomes the
fortress that must be protected. And the narcissism that initiated the
aggressive formation of the ego closes itself off from the wider social world
into a cultural solipsism: the self must be contained and the social world
must protect its fragile containment. Desire, the dynamic that drives ego-formation and this
attenuated notion of intersubjectivity for Lacan, ultimately remains trapped in this fortress
of the narcissistic self. When experienced by the hegemonic
subject position that finds the world to be its self-reflective
mirror, this desire wallows in sameness and lashes out
aggressively against all that is different. When experienced by the abjected position,
this desire cannot effectively resist its submission to the violent world
which abjects it. Grounded in the fundamental need for the other, this
model of the self frames the world as a collection of finite
beings who may violate and threaten its own small place in the
world: scarcity precludes abundance; and These are the terms of
our culture, a culture of phallicized whiteness. And they are the terms I want to develop further as I turn
toward possible responses to these dilemmas.

14.
Their sentiment K is totally wrong---stories of pain combined
with political action avoid vampiristic consumption and
motivate effective harm-reduction
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies Program, Washington U in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be
Televised, 228-232
Despite my disappointment in these films and frequent annoyance with the narrative trajectory of many of their productions, I admit that I

I, too, used to automatically criticize made-for-television

have a bit of a soft spot for the Lifetime network.

movies “inspired by a true story” about women at risk. I found them exploitative, as
any film can be that makes entertainment out of a personal tragedy. Lifetime
Television has been called “television for victims,” in a criticism of its seemingly endless capacity to show fi lms about the victimization of
women.5 One of the questions that this moniker raises is what kind of storylines about people have the most dramatic impact. Popular fi
lms with high dramatic impact depict violence, stories of surviv- ing some atypical traumatic event, or struggling with some more
powerful person or entity. One aspect of the criticisms of Lifetime is the objection to formulaic melodrama in itself, framed within the
gendered derision of women’s victimization narratives or, on the other side of the political spectrum, discomfort with such narratives as
demeaning, reductive, and trite. The fi lms shown on the network, some produced by Lifetime but most produced elsewhere, vary in
quality, but the criticisms of Lifetime raise a question that I have explored throughout this book: What is the best way to represent a story

Simply crying at a Lifetime film clearly cannot sustain any sub-

of suffering? ¶ 229¶

stantive political work—but what if the crying citizen is directed to, at the
very least, awareness, and in the best case scenario, action, after their
emotional catharsis? Sorrow produced at the sight of a dead or wounded
woman may not accomplish anything unless the representation is
framed in relationship to some political action, but tears in
relation to abolition and child abduction did produce action. However, a major ethical
problem with using sympathy and compassion as the primary mechanism for political change is that sentimental politics depends on the
cultural feelings of those in power, and the disempowered must depend on patronage. Hannah Arendt argues that compassion cannot
embrace a larger population, but pity can, and pity is a dangerous affect because it cannot exist without misfortune, thus “it has just as
much vested interest in the existence of the unhappy as thirst for power has a vested interest in the existence of the weak . . . by being a
virtue of sentiment, pity can be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will almost automatically lead to a glorifi cation of its cause, which is the

the charge against Lifetime could be that it thus

suffering of others.”6 ¶ Following Arendt,

encourages sadism because watchers could take pleasure in pity. Or, as literary
critic Marianne Noble has suggested in her study of sentimentality, the network might embrace masochism because watchers would

However, these
identify with the sufferer and might begin to take pleasure in these fantasies of subjection.7

readings of the pleasures of consuming stories of subjection

are too narrow. In the case of Lifetime, casting these films as only narratives of
victimization is too limited a reading. After watching several fi lms, I began to be compelled by stories I had not
heard before about women interven- ing when the state fails to protect them. The stories were clearly not only

about victimization, but also about survival. The movies negotiate a

balance between structural critique and stories of individual heroism, and I am
often disappointed, as with the fi lms discussed above, with how much weight is placed on the side of individual transformation.
Nonetheless I later began defending the network out of political principle, as part of a broader effort to challenge the ¶ 230¶ facile
denunciation of the word “victim.” Lifetime’s fi lms are often poor in terms of artistic merit, but the network is contributing to a national

conversation about what agency can look like. ¶ My argument may seem as if I am looking for
politics in all the wrong places, relying on sentimentality when I should focus on politically rational arguments
that eschew the appeals of emotional response. I am not asking for radical progressivism from

popular culture. Instead, I am arguing that politics is often accomplished

through the popular and conventional work of emotional appeals, as many
activists throughout history have demonstrated. The question facing
activists for African American women—or, for that matter, advocates for any identity group outside the
national imaginary of ideal citizenship—is not only how to expose discrimination, but also

how to make use of existing rhetoric so that attacks on their bodies can be
read as pressing concerns for all U.S. citizens. Affect and popular culture can be easily
criticized as tools of anti-intellectual conservative machines. As Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno rightly argue, popular culture focuses on producing narratives of comfort or affects that can ultimately serve the state’s

escaping the political storytelling of the status quo elicited by

purposes.8 Totally

mass-produced texts is indeed impossible. However, the impossibility of

total escape does not preclude the possibility of making use of tools
produced by ideology. Mobilizing affect demands use of proven rhetorical
tools, but this use need not forestall a criticism of the need to employ the
structures in the first place. Negotiating the relationship between
challenging the “master’s tools” and making use of them to garner financial
support and political power is not an easy project, but it is a necessary one.
¶ The book’s title is inspired by this very tension between see- ing popular cultural productions as inevitably politically ineffi cacious and
recognizing the possibilities offered by making use of widely circulated genres and media. When Gil Scott-Heron produced his famous
choreo-poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in 1974, he called attention to the disconnect between radical action and violent
struggles taking place in the streets and the pleasures of oblivion offered by scripted television and commercials.9 Television stood in for
mass-produced media that would not show what was really occurring in the streets, like “pigs shooting down brothers in instant replay.”
Scott-Heron pointed to the need for his audience to take to the streets and participate, live, in the revolution. Indeed, a ¶ 231¶ rue
revolution requires “live” political action and organizing, and television and many cultural productions neglect a multitude of issues that
are politically urgent. However, it is clearly no longer the case that “pigs shooting down brothers in the street is left off of instant replay.”
Important events are depicted on the news, in scripted tele- vision shows, in genre fi ction, in magazines, in movies, and on the Internet.
You can even catch the occasional social message in a television commercial. Rather than reject various media wholesale, we are left with a
set of questions about what to do with contemporary media realities. How and why are certain kinds of traditionally neglected issues
represented? Once represented, how are they interpreted, and can activists play a role in that interpretation? What do activists do about the
complexities lost when they make use of certain kinds of mass-marketed discourses? ¶ Octavia Butler perhaps best articulated this problem
in her science-fi ction novel Parable of the Talents. The novel exemplifi es what Lauren Berlant calls the postsentimental text—one that
exhibits longing for the unconfl icted intimacy and political promise senti- mentality offers but is skeptical of the ultimate political effi cacy
of making feeling central to political change. Her heroine, Olamina, suffers from “hyperempathy” syndrome, which allows her to feel the
emotions of others, but Butler is careful to argue that being able to feel the pain of others is not the means for liberation—it is a “delusional
disorder.” Thus Olamina focuses on other modes of political change, and struggles to gain followers for her politi- cal and spiritual project
for survival, Earthseed, in a United States devastated by environmental destruction and the domination of a repressive fusion of
government and a religious right organiza- tion called Christian America. Through Olamina’s struggle, Butler addresses the intellectual
discomfort with consumption by having a character explicitly argue that only strategic commodifi cation will result in successful
dissemination of radical ideas. Olamina struggles with the means by which she can circulate Earthseed, until someone suggests to her that
she must use the marketing tools she slightly disparages to compel people to her project. Her companion, Len, argues that Olamina must
“focus on what people want and tell them how your system will help them get it.” She resists the call to “preach” the way her Christian
American enemy Jarret does, rejecting “preaching,” “telling folksy stories,” emphasizing a profi t motive, and self-consciously using her
charismatic persona to sell Earthseed. ¶ 232¶ Len argues that her resistance to using the tools of commodifi cation “leaves the fi eld to
people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world.”10 Butler ultimately presents the moral that the project of producing populist
texts for mass consumption cannot be left to those with unproductive or dangerous dreams, abandoned by a Left that desires not only

productions of mass-culture are

revolution but also political change resulting in real material gains.¶ Clearly, the

not the only way to move people to action, but they are no doubt a tool. The
dismissiveness accompanying the label of the sentimental in contemporary culture is
because academic critics claim that it does not do anything, it is the
antithesis of action. However, this book is about how sentimentality is doing
things all the time. For better or worse, it teaches people to identify “proper”
objects of sympathy. It teaches people how to relate to each other. It
teaches people how to make compelling arguments about their pain. The circulation
of sentimental political storytelling often depends on media to which many progressives have a schizophrenic relationship. News media
and television are often tools of the state, but citizens depend on the news for the free circulation of information and often look for
progressive politics in television shows. Others disavow the “idiot box” altogether and have faith only in alternative news sources.
However, the dichotomy between the popular and other spaces in which people tell stories about suffering is a false one. Sentimental

political storytelling is omnipresent in U.S. culture. While the discourse has many short-comings,
people interested in political change are taking a perilous road
if they ignore the possibilities of imperfect stories told about
citizens in pain.
15. That’s best --- sentimentality is politically effective when it
is recognized as part of a larger project
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies Program, Washington U in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be
Televised, p. 9
When theorists criticize
However, sentimentality cannot easily be understood as progressive or conservative.

producers of sentimentality for conservative politics, they sometimes attack a

rhetoric that is reactionary or designed to serve the status quo. At other times, such critics express disappointment at
a text’s possibly radical revolutionary or otherwise progressive potential having been short-circuited in favor of feel-good closure offered
by the sentimental narrative. World Trade Center provoked exactly this response from movie critic David Edelstein, who wanted the fi lm
about the event of 9/11 to be “more political,” because the “heartwarming conclusion” to the fi lm is “unrepresentative—to the point
where it almost seems like a denial of the deeper and more enduring horror.”22 Sentimental texts present themselves frequently as
progressive about social justice issues while they eventually preserve the status quo. Indeed, that is an overlying tendency of most
sentimental texts. However, the binaries of good and bad, Left and Right are insufficient
to categorize sentimentality as it does, by its nature, have a progressive
political thrust. It addresses the suffering of the politically disadvantaged
but utilizes conventional narratives and practices that will not fundamentally disrupt power. Rather than

characterizing U.S. sentimentality as “good” or “bad” politics, a more

precise characterization—albeit more of a mouthful and less dramatic—is to call it a
politically effective but insufficient means of political change.
16. Alt silences suffering
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies Program, Washington U in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be
Televised, 180-3

Recognizing the political valence of pain—of speaking pain—

is essential to black survival Given the poorer health status of African .

Americans in the U S nited those

tates, the fact that pain is often ignored or borne silently before seeking care, and undertreated once care is sought,

who work with African Americans need to emphasize the right to tell
stories of pain Obstacles to black storytelling not only come from white
.

institutional sources, but they also come from self-perceptions that if

African Americans can claim nothing else, they can claim strength . The strong-black-

models of black strength fill the U.S.

woman stereotype, John Henry, the brave and stoic kids integrating the store, and other

imaginary Reinterpreting the naming and speaking of pain can

.

be an act of power, not an act of powerlessness. One person who recognized the power in

speaking about pain was Audre Lorde. In The Cancer Journals she described how she wanted people to respond to her cancer in a way that was atten- tive her identity, to the fact that she was
black and feminist and a lesbian. After her mastectomy, she journaled, “I want to write about the pain.”74 She wanted to write about the pain because she would “willingly pay whatever price in
pain was needed, to savor the weight of completion; to be utterly fi lled, not with conviction nor with ¶ 181¶ faith, but with experience—knowledge, direct and different from all other
certainties.” Writing about the pain, speaking about the pain imparts knowledge, a different kind of knowledge than that validated by the allegedly objective methodologies of medicine and

medical storytelling is a visceral example of how black

science, but knowledge nonetheless. The example of

pain has been dismissed in relationship to political agendas

or reframed various .

Sentimental political storytelling, for all its faults, provides an

important intervention This intervention.¶ A Coda on Moving from Spectator/ Spectacle to Agents in Our Own Care¶

can be, as in the best examples of sentimental political storytelling both ,

public and private, both therapeutic and a political call to arms. When I saw a call for papers
for the “Anarcha Symposium,” The Anarcha Project’s Michigan workshop, I applied with both public and private work. I shared academic scholarship I had written about Anarcha as well as
creative nonfi ction about my surgery, fi nding the rare space in the academy that made space for both. Called together in 2007, many of us engaged in scholarship who did not see ourselves as
scholars, in creative performance when we did not see ourselves as performers. The group who came together to discuss Anarcha, J. Marion Sims, and the issues the history raised were eclectic:
undergraduates taking classes in disability studies, scholars and performers who focused on African American culture, dancers, singers, those who had movement constraints, and those of us
who had constraints that were less visible. Over the course of a few days we performed physical and mental exercises, bonding in both small and large groups in order to shape a performance at
the end of our time together. We were transformed from spectators into spectacle, but it was a process of constructing a spectacle that was by no means one way—we looked back in history and

looked out to those who could engage with us. While minimalist in presentation, it contained the excesses of our emotional response to Anarcha’s history and our presents. ¶ If a
problem with sentimental political storytelling is the conflation of with other kinds

oppressed bodies, the productively messy conflations pushed us to think

about a broader nexus of institutional oppression ¶ . We were divided into small performance groups, and we 182¶
struggled to fi nd a collective response that refl ected all of our readings of Anarcha’s, Lucy’s, and Betsey’s histories, as well as the histories of other unnamed women. On a stark stage, with our
bodies, micro- phones, and lights shaping the space, my group produced a short choreo-piece after two days of work in which the group collectively prompted individual stories with the refrain,
“This is Anarcha’s story, and . . .” it was the story of all of us. One of us challenged the his- torical record that Anarcha “willingly consented” in Sims’s narrative while also addressing the issue of
her relatives’ lack of consent to medical experimentation during the Nazi Holocaust. Another of us without the use of her legs told the story of being sexually molested by a medical caregiver,
describing “histories and futures lost . . . one black, one white, one slave, one not . . . neither touched by request, both silenced by circumstance.” In drawing a comparison between the invisible
stories—Anarcha’s and her own—she explored how the broader issue of nonconsent and voicelessness in medical care can be read across history and identity. One of us discussed the lack of
choices and resistance when fi ghting “medical men”; another discussed fear shaped by history. Drawing on my history, I added to the chorus with a recognition of my difference from Anarcha as
well as my sense of connection to her: “I am not Anarcha,” but see her story as my story, “not because my issues are hers, but because I need someone to hear her pain . . . and alleviate it.” And

as we moved in and out of our individual and collective refrains shaped by

our specific stories, the chorus built community, acknowledging the
differences between our histories and our similar investments at the same
time. We learned to “practice theater as a language that is
, as Boal suggests in Theater of the Oppressed,

living and present, not as a finished product displaying images from the
past ¶ .”75 I fi nd telling my own story diffi cult; in some ways, telling the story of pain management after my surgery and telling of the Anarcha Symposium performance are equally diffi
cult. Two spaces of judgment are possible—judgment of my tolerance for pain and judgment of my creative work, both of which are linked to what it means to make myself vulnerable. I was
advised to cut my personal story from this chapter because of the danger of exposing myself. But if we take sentimental political storytelling seriously as an opportunity to treat affect and the
story of pain as essential to political progress, what example would I set if I remained continually in a space of academic distance when I believe in the political efficacy ¶ 183¶ of the sentimental
narrative? As a subject who has been raced and pained in the United States, I must don the mantle of articulating my affective investment in recognizing the relationship between race and pain
without shame. ¶ As I say that it is hard to talk about pain—broadly—in the U.S. without talking about race, I recognize that the claim can be read as hyperbolic, and inadequately supported. The
charge of hyperbole is often leveled against sentimental rhetoric. But a review of history, rhetoric, and social and medical discourse reveals that these concepts are often linked in the United States.

When we recognize that we can be subjects of various discourses about

race and pain, and not only subject to a specialized language, such a shift
in understand- ing may empower people to be agents , as health-care advocates encourage, in their

Allowing stories of pain to be silenced,

own care. Silence, as Audre Lorde, famously wrote, will not protect you.76

dismissed, or obscured, however, will surely kill you. We must speak pain
to power .