Dissociation as Dislocation From Violence

Abstract

Those of us with embodied experiences of gender diversity and sexually assault have and continue to be subject to psychiatric diagnosis and categorization that pathologize our acts of dissociation within a medical framework. In this paper we adopt Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press new materialist ontology of agential realism to argue that agentially cutting psychiatric discourse on dissociative symptoms could materialize new realities for embodied people which have been excluded to the psychiatric realm of abjection via gender diversity and sexual assault. Specifically, we explore how approaching dissociative symptoms not as dysfunction but as forms of agential dislocation from hegemonic norms of race and gender could open new political horizons by naming relations of dominance.