Gut feelings: Indigestibility as an archive of surplus Otherness

My mother always told me to bleed discreetly. I have taken heed of this warning in my pursuits, biting my tongue before the words can spill over. But the wound festers, and now I find myself bleeding on everything I touch, so to speak. I want to admit the wound for the little girl I was, picking at this scab, begging to be believed. So I return to those nostalgia-steeped snapshots of girlhood, and interspersed between there’s the crispness of a particular, recurring bodily mechanism: vomiting. I didn’t know at the time, but nausea- its psychological and ideological loadedness- would critically recalibrate my relationship to just about everything. Indeed, when it comes to primal bodily sensations, Moveable Feast is deeply indebted to my illness, for the set of experiences it granted me.