I've always been moved by the ways that we can translate text into image and image into text. Hysterical Intimacies are a series I started to make after I finished my book manuscript: 'Touch Me, I'm Sick: Essays on Hysterical Intimacies.' Hysterical intimacies are the queer, crip modes of caring for ourselves and others that resist and outright challenge the ableist pathologizing logics of cisheteronormativity. This is another name for intimacy that is not threatened by “contradictory desires," excess, and the messiness of living with complex trauma. 

In my book, I write: "All intimacy is, in part, hysterical because when we step into intimacy, we take the risk of being deemed 'too much' for someone else. In the landscape of hysterical intimacies, there’s a key difference: within this exchange, in which I expose myself before you and you choose to stick around, you also celebrate my too muchness. When it comes to hysterical intimacies, there’s no such thing as over-sharing. If what I’ve shared 'exceeds' the boundaries of what is deemed 'normal' you, my intimate person, do not feel what I’ve shared is too much."

I'm frankly exhausted by the argument that trauma threatens intimacy. Hysterical intimacies work from the belief that trauma doesn’t have to threaten interdependence; rather, naming and recognizing trauma can help us foster intimacy. Hysterical intimacies recognize that interdependence enables us to resist and heal from the systemic and individual traumas that have made us sick. Within the landscape of hysterical intimacies, the sick body receives the care and intimacy it so deserves.

What better way to represent hysterical intimacies than with furbies? These little weirdos evoke much ambivalence: you love them, hate them, feel unsettled by them. I, personally, find them adorable. Using backdrops created from images in vintage magazines, I staged these furbies in various scenes of intimacy with one another. Then, I uploaded the images to canva - the same way that I make my memes for my account @softcore_trauma - and overlaid some of my writing on top. In this way, they are meant to replicate the found images I source through pinterest, while evoking the still life.

Margeaux Feldman
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Margeaux Feldman (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses creative writing, visual art, and social technologies to promote mental health and disability justice. Their artistic practice focuses on experiences of living with complex trauma and chronic illness, and the struggles they've faced forming the kinds of intimacy that they've always desired. Margeaux is currently in the first year of their MFA in Creative Writing at California Institute of the Arts and prior to this completed a PhD in English Literature and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. They are the author of the book manuscript, Touch Me, I'm Sick: Hysterical Intimacies, ten self-published zines and their essays and book reviews have been published in GUTS Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, and Rabble, amongst others. Their installation Soft Magic was part of #CripRitual at Tangled Arts + Disability and their memes and collages have been featured in various zines and exhibition catalogues. Margeaux is the creator of anchored: a deck for healing and the coloring book In My Healing Era. They run the popular instagram meme account @softcore_trauma. You can learn more about the work they do in the world via their website: www.margeauxfeldman.com