Some nerve: invisible debilitations, explosive restraint and the in-valid

Abstract

Some Nerve: Invisible Debilitations, Explosive Restraint and the In-Valid engages sociological, critical and feminist frameworks to examine the cultural and political encoding of normative human behaviour. Through kinetic objects, drawing, photography, video and performance, my work considers marginalized others and the subversive destabilization or appropriation of identity and subjectivity available in theories of the grotesque, in body art, and in autobiography. Personal historiographies, transgenerational trauma, and postmemory together form the investigative structure of collective identity and personal narrative. The new, embodied postmodern subject embraces identity that is unstable, open, changing, and that blurs the lines between self and other. By drawing parallels to historical medical and psychoanalytical treatments, I look at contemporary discursive methods that pathologize bodies and behaviours and construct “disease.” Prosthetics and body restraints become metaphorical indicators of social constraint and civic silencing. Inspired by literature, popular culture, science fiction, and self-help books, my work explores physical and ideological impediments, interpersonal conflict, explosion and restraint, repression and acting out. A Nervous System is not only a vital system inherent in an individual body; systems of nervousness also signal a condition of cultural anxiety produced by precarious political and institutional power structures.