"The history of diseases are similar to the history of language, you can follow their movement across history, borders, between bodies"

My kingdom for a stack of books (source: fil twitter de Sam Sax, 24.08.2017)

Dans un entretien super intéressant avec Phillip M. Miner, Sam Sax explique en quoi son identité Queer et la maladie mentale influent sur son œuvre. Extraits.


“Lineage and etymology and inheritance are a large part of everything I write and what I’m interested in. I’m Jewish and interested in Jewish diasporic narratives, that game of telephone where culture and language shift and change from year to year from country to country.
I also identify as a queer. I identify as a faggot. I like the term “invert” / “sodomite”. Names that give birth to an identity you have to negotiate how to live inside.”

“What started the book [Madness, Penguin, 2017] was I found this list of reasons for admission to Allegheny Asylum in the 1800’s and that’s where I started to work from on this book. It included things like “kicked in the head by a horse”, “masturbation into tobacco” and “novel reading”. It’s funny and horrifying when you look at how where we’re at now is rooted in these racialized, homophobic, sexist categories of normalcy.
After I was diagnosed with anxiety disorder I was amazed how my thinking around my mental health changed when it was given a name. I was diagnosed and then suddenly I was different. Although nothing material was different in how I lived in my body or how I experienced the world.”

“I think that ties into the history of how queerness is pathologized. How desire has always been pathologized…really, any deviant behavior. Psychological taxonomical categories as ways of promoting traditional family units.”

Sam Sax, in ‘Poet Sam Sax Chats About Queer Identity, Sex, & Mental Health’, 

by Phillip M. Miner (Huffington Post-11/13/2017)