Susie Russell examines her experience of embodiment, relationality, and interdependence at the 2025 PhD School: Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities.
I go to the acknowledgements first.
When I begin reading a book or an article, I start (as the text often does) with the essential network of relations that has made the work possible. That has nurtured it into being.
For me, the acknowledgements are as much the content of the work as the words bearing argument and narrative. If chapters or sections are the body of a text, the acknowledgements, to me, are its vital organs or circulatory system. This acknowledgement-centric reading habit of mine signals my prevailing research interests: interdependence and relationality.
For some years, my research has swirled around a paradox: how experiences that are often assumed to reside in and adhere to individual bodies can be distributed and collective. My engagement with this paradox began with an anthropological study of the collective embodiment of pain under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Following threads of corporeality, gender, and memory, I went on to an historical study of the role of fathers in the UK’s National Childbirth Trust.
My current doctoral project explores bodily boundaries/porosity in reproduction by focusing on sympathetic pregnancy. Sympathetic pregnancy names a phenomenon whereby someone close to a pregnant woman or person (this could be a spouse, parent, sibling, or friend) has embodied experiences associated with the pregnancy, such as morning sickness and toothache.
Each of my research projects, past and present, relies on the feminist and queer theorising that having/being a body complicates any atomised account of the world. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, “[t]he skin connects as well as contains” (2006, 551). So, I explore the forms of connection and containment that sympathetic pregnancy may express and encode, with a view to the gendered and racialised politics of labour.
Horizontal encounters
Recently, my partner—an academic and the person who, more than any other, has made queer life possible for me—pointed out a potential paradox, by drawing attention to “my own” body. While I’m engrossed in collective embodiment, he observed, my being in the world is largely reserved. I hold things at a distance, persistently assessing and attempting to shore up my own boundaries, even as I desire connection.
Am I performing some dance of relationality and refusal? Or, I wonder, after visiting Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery! exhibition, am I preoccupied by that which I cannot quite imagine?
For Bowery, the preoccupation was death, a subject he found both absorbing and virtually unfathomable. Bowery, I read in the exhibition wall text, had once chalked up his difficulty imagining the “full stop” of death to his “Australian optimism” (he grew up in a Melbourne suburb called Sunshine). In calling the exhibition Leigh Bowery! the Tate honours this sentiment: the “full stop” of death refashioned into an exclamation point.
But, after a time, death did become tangible and, in some ways, knowable for Bowery.
Five years after his best friend, flat mate and close collaborator Trojan died, Bowery poignantly declared “if someone were to put different weights in my hand, I’d be able to say which one was the weight of his hand.” Encountering the unimaginable, the unfathomable, we recall the immediate and intimate bodily knowledge of lives entwined, lives shared. We live with and feel the weight of our irresolvable paradoxical preoccupations.
And so, alongside my formal and explicit academic concerns, I smuggled my embodied containment/connection paradox in with me to the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School in Durham.
As a shy person and a slow thinker, I am regularly floored by the creeping pressure to speak in group settings. This is the kind of discomfort that forecloses; it makes me feel at odds with the world, my skin seeming only to contain, not to connect.
But in the PhD school I encountered a mode of generous accountability which gifted me an extraordinary experience of acceptance. In this space, the pressure to speak simply didn’t exist. Instead, there was ample and ongoing opportunity to share (often within my preferred social unit of the pair or small group). And many ways of sharing, including the quiet-come-audible method of writing suggested tracks for a collaborative playlist accompanying Ben Dalton and Chase Ledin’s zining workshop.
In the PhD school, I found myself enmeshed in what Dalton and Ledin, drawing on key queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, call “new horizontal encounters…[in] a queer ethic of care” (2024: 291). In these horizontal encounters, we recognised listening and speaking as equally valued positions and modes to act in and move between.
Breathing pairs
So many paired things seem odd.
Kay ryan, 1994
A sense of pairing as queer method arose through the very structure of the School; each session was guided by a presenting duo. Though sessions varied, with one tutor’s solo presentation usually following the other’s, their distinct and connected topics and styles met and mixed in powerful ways.
In exploring the queer “I”, queer cultural theorist João Florêncio remarked in passing on his method of teaching with paragraphs from scholarly works. After vocally animating the bodies of text that appeared on-screen, Florêncio then moved us to other bodies, by reading from his urgent and enthralling co-authored work Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising.
Companion tutor, gender theorist Edyta Just, then offered her configurations of coexistence, speaking to and reading directly from her searing text on horror as a means of understanding and living with the haunting presence of chronic pain. Like Florêncio, Just shared something of the ethic of her pedagogy, referring to the slide-lessness of her session portion as an ‘absence,’ an absence which only underscored her vital presence.
Each presentation bore its own power, driven by the rhythm of its embodied pedagogy, coming into being as one of two.
In this session, I felt the generative energy of being among fellow listening bodies, enthralled. Offering up the critical and ethico-political potential of autoethnography, Florêncio and Just invited us to dwell with the ways that bodily stories can extend, exceed, and fortify the self, perpetually attentive to what and who bodies tend towards.
Florêncio and Just’s extended readings reminded me of North American feminist anthropologist Emily Martin’s 1994 book Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture—from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. As part of my perennial practice of attempting to rapidly consume (inhale) overdue library books—usually while in transit to return them—I was struck by a particular quality of the text. It was the sense that those interviewed by Martin and her team of graduate student fieldworkers had sustained presence or voice, far beyond the academic norm of truncated quotations.
Often, a voice existed within a pair; a pair bookended with analytical text, rather than interrupted by it. The chapter on nonscientist understandings of the immune system begins with a pair of interviewee quotes and continues with long, unbroken interview passages. At times, the passages include the interviewers’ utterances, acknowledging and enacting the relationality of interviews.
What I appreciated, perhaps above all else in my somewhat hasty reading of Flexible Bodies was, ironically, a feeling of unhurried dwelling.
A sense of generosity and accountability in making space for a perspective to exist, to be established on the page, before becoming connected to another. As though people who were perhaps unknown to one another passed a baton, or a breath, between them.
What Martin calls the “visceral learning” of her fieldwork included training within a key AIDS service organisation in Baltimore to become a volunteer ‘buddy’ to HIV positive people. Perhaps what I understand as Martin’s method of textual pairing arose from the palpable responsibility of putting her sensing body in the very contexts where bodily immunity is at stake, of putting her body in proximity to those under acute attack. In turn, we, as readers, as listeners, sense the vulnerability and solidarity that forms the raw material of the text, as our own visceral learning.
So, what was my visceral learning in Durham?
Being part of horizontal relationships of care and noticing how pairing can craft ways of being together in/with difference, I felt a generative pressure. I felt this pressure when invited, with good humour, to be a little less hesitant, a little less inhibited, when writing a letter to future self—one of our last acts together in the PhD School. The invitation, I think, was to find a way to bridge my own personal temporality with that of our collective; to perhaps forgo something to gain something else.
After all, skimming and speed scanning Flexible Bodies within the time constraint of the duration of a car ride from my home to my university library had yielded a precious realisation. There is a generosity in being pushed, in being contained (and unmade) by those we are connected to, in orienting one’s body towards unfamiliar objects.
Perhaps it is this kind of orientation that turns a full stop into an exclamation point!
About the author
Susie Russell is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University. She is researching sympathetic pregnancy/couvade and the figure of the pregnant man. Twitter: @suse_russell
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. ‘Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12 (4): 543-574.
Dalton, Benjamin and Chase Ledin. 2024. ‘Queer Medical Humanities.’ The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory: 1-17.
Florêncio, João, and Liz Rosenfeld. 2025. Crossings: Creative ecologies of cruising. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Just, Edyta. 2024. ‘Horror & Life: Telling a Story in Order Not to Run.’ Advances in Applied Sociology 14: 201-214.
Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture—from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.
Ryan, Kay. 1994. ‘Paired Things.’ Flamingo Watching: Poems. Providence, R.I.: Copper Beech Press.
