touch me, i’m sick: essays on hysterical intimacy

forthcoming fall 2025

Touch Me, I’m Sick is a memoir-in-essays that blends together deeply personal narrative, cultural criticism, manifesto, and auto-theory to explore the intersections of sickness, complex trauma, intimacy, care, and sexuality. In this book, I look at the lengthy history of labeling girls, women, and femmes–and their desires–as sick. From the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the continued imprisonment of sex workers, the sexuality of girls, women, and femmes is all too often framed as in need of containment by the state.

in the face of this violence, those who are labeled as sick, myself included, refuse to distance ourselves from the figure of the hysteric by embracing our sickness–a radical act that enables us to imagine queer modes of care that I refer to as “hysterical intimacies.”

Each essay addresses, in its own way, the wager of intimacy: will you love me and care for me if I reveal my trauma? Will you touch me if I’m sick? As I attempt to answer this question, I weave together my personal experiences with trauma and sickness alongside examples from mythology, popular culture, social media, literature, visual arts, and activism. Each essay offers a different roadmap for how we might care for another and foster intimacy while refusing to disavow or pathologize our sickness.