Week 5/6

Regarding the relation between privacy and anonymity, Alan Westin – former professor of public law at Columbia and author of the influential book Privacy and freedom – listed urban anonymity and anonymity of publication as one of four
distinct types of privacy, the other three being solitude, intimacy, and reserve. Solitude, which refers to the state of each individual ‘freed from the observations of others’, is ‘the most complete state of privacy that individuals can achieve’
(Westin, 2006 [1967]: 36-37). Intimacy refers to forms of ‘corporate seclusion’, small social units of personally related people like family, friends or colleagues. Finally, the term ‘reserve’ seems inspired by Georg Simmel’s sociological
observations on the transformations of mental life in the city, where reserve and indifference designate the behavioural attitudes of discretion and mental distance that respects the personal demands and psychic requirements of interactional
partners under metropolitan conditions. P264

To their benefit, Warren and Brandeis did not understand privacy to include anonymity in the sociological sense at all. In a state of privacy, familyand friends are the very opposite of anonymous to each other. Neither is the secluded individual anonymous to himself, nor for that matter are they anonymous to others outside of the domestic sphere. These relationships are
persistent and personal, rather than ephemeral and impersonal, based on mutual trust and shared social codes, rather than suspicion and indifference. In this context, it makes no sense to speak of anonymity as conducive to privacy, as these
two concepts belong to mutually exclusive socio-cultural registers. P2682

Drawings based on research

We can not be anonymous online. Because anyhow what we do, buy or like is kept in a database if we do it online it is kept in a database to show us different content later. There is not really a thing called privacy. It goes even so far that our mind is manipulated by the things we do online because through a algorithm we see what they want to show us.

Conclusion after class

By projecting the human body in its ephemeral anonymity as merely one interchangeable thing or image among others, the auratic ‘ritual value’ that secures the distinction between person and thing collapses into the aesthetic ‘exhibition
value’ that both immanently possess. P272

From this research about anonymity in our life and what is the meaning my conclusion is that being anonymous is not easy. It is more about putting on a mask or hiding/changing your identity than being anonymous. The only way we can still be anonymous is in for example a big city. But if we are anonymous in our offline world we are still tracked in our online world. Okay of course if you decide not to have social media or not to post you can me more anonymous but still in certain ways being and living a anonymous lifestyle is not possible. For example cameras on the street track us and our face is recognizable. From on my research I decided to make one-drawings on Illustrator to visualize anonymous and what it means for me and our Western society. I'm not gonna ad words to it so everybody can find their own meaning in the drawings.

I don't think we are really anonymous online. We maybe think we reply anonymous but the database or a hacker can easily track what we are doing. They can see how many social media accounts you have and also what you do on each ones. Within the social dilemma is also explained how they can manipulate our thinking for example about election. This is why I don't believe in being anonymous in the digital world.

BUT I believe you can have a anonymous identity online during your visual language, talking or behavior. You can also change your identity when you are online. Only there is a database behind it who still knows the person behind that identity is you. Where you are sitting. The kind of laptop you have etc. But the persons you maybe communicate with for them you can be just anonymous

The visuals I searched are from different photographers. In most of them is a hidden messages or it was part of a contest/campaign. You only know this if you are familiar with the visual. The image above is to spread awareness for the Uygur Muslims in China. But if you never saw this visual or the color behind it you also can not understand why people change their profil picture on social media in blue. It's like a secret language

(a different view on anonymity)
What is anonymity? Most of us feel that the large cities we inhabit are somehow hostile to the extent that they do not echo back at us a recognizable confirmation of who we are. So we are familiar with anonymity in one way or another.

I decided apart from visuals that I also wanted to read papers about this topic. The first paper give you more insight about our anonymity online and what changed through the years. The second paper is about urban city and living anonymous in a urban city. A urban city is a city with a high population.

After a conversation in my group and with Amy i'm gonna change my research topic a little bit. What we figured out in the group is that we all are researching our inner self and what led to our identity now. I'm interested in why human beings are the way they are and what causes their behavior specific in this research i'm going to dive in to my own inner body knowledge and other inner body knowledge from disabled feminists. I'm born with a chronic illness and as a child and as a teenager I always wore a mask to hide it because when I showed it in some moments it always came back to me in a negative way. However it was a big role in my life because I slayed in hospitals and had to visit doctors a lot and also had 6 heart surgeries in 19 years. When 2 years ago I had a septic shock what was out of a sudden I came home from a date with a guy I met the day before in the club and the next evening I was laying on the ICU and I had to stay 6 weeks in the hospital. From this moment my second identity (Sick Me) was more exposed to everybody around me and myself. I had a hard time after that because my body had to recover fisical and psychical. From on this moment me myself was exposed to my identity and the world could see that I was sick. With this i'm interested in researching other sick creatives and from on this I want to adjust it with my major Fashion & Branding and research how chronically illness is exposed in fashion or not at all.

The main question from the group is What shaped our sense self? My main question is how my chronic illness shaped my identity?

I save quotes on the hot glue as a note and add the theory to the group in teams.

"identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when
something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty" P597

This produces the post-modern subiect, conceptualized as having no fixed, essential, or permanent identity. Identity becomes a "moveable feast": formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways u'e
are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround u.
(HaU, 1gB7). P598

It questioned the classic distinction between "inside" and "outside,''"private" and "public." Feminism's slogan was "the personal is
political." P611

Stuart Hall on identity and identification

From on the drawings I realized that i'm more interested why people choose to present themselves a certain way. This is also what you can see back in the drawings.

This was relating to me and my archive because your identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis. when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. He writes about inside and the outside. What you show to the public and what you like to keep private.

Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory:
Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice

I consider how postinternet practices of making space for sickness and sadness in autotheoretical ways can be understood in relation to the imperatives of intersectionality and the complications of neoliberalism inthe twenty-first-century feminist present. P644

feminists have critiqued male-authored theory for not acknowledging its own subjectivity or its gendered and racialized aspects. P646

Sedgwick’s autotheoretical writing. In addition to Hedva, it includes works by artists, writers, poets, and scholars like Amy Berkowitz, Lazard, Dodie Bellamy, Leslie Jamison, Gillian Rose, Eula Biss, Susan Brison, Saidiya Hartman, Kate Zambreno, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha,Meghan O’Rourke, S. Lochlann Jain, Mari Ruti, Kapil, and Claudia
Rankine, as well as earlier works by Lorde, Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Lisa Steele. They all use autotheory to make visible and then theorize experiences of illness, disease, pain, trauma, and grief—either personal or experienced by others—and to connect these experiences to political, social, and structural issues of concern to feminists, including the delegitimization of women’s pain and the interrelatedness of sexual trauma with mysterious, feminized illnesses like fibromyalgia. P649

Hedva uses her ongoing experience of living with chronic illness to write a new, intersectional feminist theory that upholds the lives, agency, and limits of those (young feminists) who are experiencing illness and disability. P649

Bell’s own theoretical practice is grounded in her work as a performance artist who includes self-imaging in her academic publications like Fast Feminism. Certain media, like performance for video, are particularly well suited to the autotheoretical mode because of its enmeshment in aesthetic issues related to self-imaging and the history of conceptual art. P651

Does a white-passing woman with class privilege taking a selfie with a book of feminist theory and posting it to Instagram constitute an autotheoretical feminist practice? What if she is in a hospital bed (Wollen)? I am cognizant
of potential problems with such modes of postinternet practices, including Sarah Sharma’s coining of the term “selfie-care” to critique the individualistic compulsion to publicly display one’s own self-care rituals
at the expense of cultivating “the conditions of possibility for people to be cared for in common” (“Selfie-Care” 14). P652

This does not eliminate the issue of whiteness nor the
potential collusions or conflations with capitalist systems that occur when this work uses avenues like Instagram and is not framed as art. I take issue with Brophy’s implication that the artists’ “awareness” might somehow exempt them from privilege; with the institutional relationships that they form, namely, the cooptation of this work by capitalist mechanisms; 654 L. FOURNIER with the work’s likeness to uncritical equivalents in the world of fashion
and design. There is a feminist politics to the affect of Sad Girl Theory: the claiming of women’s right not to smile, to be a kind of cute feminist. P655

Sick Woman Theory - Mask Magazine

So, as I lay there, unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any traditional capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?

I have chronic illness. For those who don’t know what chronic illness means, let me help: the word “chronic” comes from the Latin chronos, which means “of time” (think of “chronology”), and it specifically means “a lifetime.” So, a chronic illness is an illness that lasts a lifetime. In other words, it does not get better. There is no cure. And think about the weight of time: yes, that means you feel it every day. On very rare occasions, I get caught in a moment, as if something’s plucked me out of the world, where I realize that I haven’t thought about my illnesses for a few minutes, maybe a few precious hours. These blissful moments of oblivion are the closest thing to a miracle that I know. When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy. It costs you to do anything: to get out of bed, to cook for yourself, to get dressed, to answer an email. For those without chronic illness, you can spend and spend without consequence: the cost is not a problem. For those of us with limited funds, we have to ration, we have a limited supply: we often run out before lunch.

There has been a slew of writing in recent years about how “female” pain is treated – or rather, not treated as seriously as men’s in emergency rooms and clinics, by doctors, specialists, insurance companies, families, husbands, friends, the culture at large. In a recent article in The Atlantic, called “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” a husband writes about the experience of his wife Rachel’s long wait in the ER before receiving the medical attention her condition warranted (which was an ovarian torsion, where an ovarian cyst grows so large it falls, twisting the fallopian tube). “Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours,” he writes. At the end of the ordeal, Rachel had waited nearly fifteen hours before going into the surgery she should have received upon arrival. The article concludes with her physical scars healing, but that “she’s still grappling with the psychic toll – what she calls ‘the trauma of not being seen.’”

The question of why the hospital’s doctors thought Brock “delusional” because of her Obama-follow claim is easily answered: Because, according to this society, a young black woman can’t possibly be that important – and for her to insist that she is must mean she’s “sick.”

Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival. It’s for my fellow spoonies. You know who you are, even if you’ve not been attached to a diagnosis: one of the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to resist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, so that they can try to fix you. You don’t need to be fixed, my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing.

The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible.

The Sick Woman is a mentally ill black woman whose family called the police for help because she was suffering an episode, and who was murdered in police custody, and whose story was denied by everyone operating under white supremacy. Her name is Tanesha Anderson.

And, crucially: The Sick Woman is who capitalism needs to perpetuate itself.

“Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way.

The Spoon Theory written by
Christine Miserandino

I started to ramble on about pills, and aches and pains, but she kept pursuing, and didn't seem satisfied with my answers. I was a little surprised as being my roommate in college and friend for years; I thought she already knew the medical definition of Lupus. Then she looked at me with a face every sick person knows well, the face of pure curiosity about something no one healthy can truly understand. She asked what it felt like, not physically, but what it felt like to be me, to be sick.

As I tried to gain my composure, I glanced around the table for help or guidance, or at least stall for time to think. I was trying to find the right words. How do I answer a question I never was able to answer for myself? How do I explain every detail of every day being effected, and give the emotions a sick person goes through with clarity. I could have given up, cracked a joke like I usually do, and changed the subject, but I remember thinking if I don’t try to explain this, how could I ever expect her to understand. If I can’t explain this to my best friend, how could I explain my world to anyone else? I had to at least try.

I explained that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn’t have to. The healthy have the luxury of a life without choices, a gift most people take for granted.

She grabbed the spoons with excitement. She didn’t understand what I was doing, but she is always up for a good time, so I guess she thought I was cracking a joke of some kind like I usually do when talking about touchy topics. Little did she know how serious I would become?
I asked her to count her spoons. She asked why, and I explained that when you are healthy you expect to have a never- ending supply of "spoons". But when you have to now plan your day, you need to know exactly how many “spoons” you are starting with. It doesn’t guarantee that you might not lose some along the way, but at least it helps to know where you are starting. She counted out 12 spoons. She laughed and said she wanted more. I said no, and I knew right away that this little game would work, when she looked disappointed, and we hadn't even started yet. I’ve wanted more "spoons" for years and haven’t found a way yet to get more, why should she? I also told her to always be conscious of how many she had, and not to drop them because she can never forget she has Lupus.

I asked her to list off the tasks of her day, including the most simple. As, she rattled off daily chores, or just fun things to do; I explained how each one would cost her a spoon. When she jumped right into getting ready for work as her first task of the morning, I cut her off and took away a spoon. I practically jumped down her throat. I said " No! You don’t just get up. You have to crack open your eyes, and then realize you are late. You didn’t sleep well the night before. You have to crawl out of bed, and then you have to make your self something to eat before you can do anything else, because if you don’t, you can't take your medicine, and if you don’t take your medicine you might as well give up all your spoons for today and tomorrow too." I quickly took away a spoon and she realized she hasn’t even gotten dressed yet. Showering cost her spoon, just for washing her hair and shaving her legs

Reaching high and low that early in the morning could actually cost more than one spoon, but I figured I would give her a break; I didn’t want to scare her right away. Getting dressed was worth another spoon. I stopped her and broke down every task to show her how every little detail needs to be thought about. You cannot simply just throw clothes on when you are sick. I explained that I have to see what clothes I can physically put on, if my hands hurt that day buttons are out of the question. If I have bruises that day, I need to wear long sleeves, and if I have a fever I need a sweater to stay warm and so on. If my hair is falling out I need to spend more time to look presentable, and then you need to factor in another 5 minutes for feeling badly that it took you 2 hours to do all this.
I think she was starting to understand when she theoretically didn’t even get to work, and she was left with 6 spoons.

I then explained to her that she needed to choose the rest of her day wisely, since when your “spoons” are gone, they are gone. Sometimes you can borrow against tomorrow’s "spoons", but just think how hard tomorrow will be with less "spoons". I also needed to explain that a person who is sick always lives with the looming thought that tomorrow may be the day that a cold comes, or an infection, or any number of things that could be very dangerous. So you do not want to run low on "spoons", because you never know when you truly will need them. I didn’t want to depress her, but I needed to be realistic, and unfortunately being prepared for the worst is part of a real day for me.

We went through the rest of the day, and she slowly learned that skipping lunch would cost her a spoon, as well as standing on a train, or even typing at her computer too long. She was forced to make choices and think about things differently. Hypothetically, she had to choose not to run errands, so that she could eat dinner that night.

When we got to the end of her pretend day, she said she was hungry. I summarized that she had to eat dinner but she only had one spoon left. If she cooked, she wouldn’t have enough energy to clean the pots. If she went out for dinner, she might be too tired to drive home safely. Then I also explained, that I didn’t even bother to add into this game, that she was so nauseous, that cooking was probably out of the question anyway. So she decided to make soup, it was easy. I then said it is only 7pm, you have the rest of the night but maybe end up with one spoon, so you can do something fun, or clean your apartment, or do chores, but you can’t do it all.

I rarely see her emotional, so when I saw her upset I knew maybe I was getting through to her. I didn’t want my friend to be upset, but at the same time I was happy to think finally maybe someone understood me a little bit. She had tears in her eyes and asked quietly “Christine, How do you do it? Do you really do this everyday?” I explained that some days were worse then others; some days I have more spoons then most. But I can never make it go away and I can’t forget about it, I always have to think about it. I handed her a spoon I had been holding in reserve. I said simply, “I have learned to live life with an extra spoon in my pocket, in reserve. You need to always be prepared”

Its hard, the hardest thing I ever had to learn is to slow down, and not do everything. I fight this to this day. I hate feeling left out, having to choose to stay home, or to not get things done that I want to. I wanted her to feel that frustration. I wanted her to understand, that everything everyone else does comes so easy, but for me it is one hundred little jobs in one. I need to think about the weather, my temperature that day, and the whole day's plans before I can attack any one given thing. When other people can simply do things, I have to attack it and make a plan like I am strategizing a war. It is in that lifestyle, the difference between being sick and healthy. It is the beautiful ability to not think and just do. I miss that freedom. I miss never having to count "spoons".

The spoon theory created an online community called spoonies. It are people who are facing the same problems not based on their gender, race or class but because they are sick. The hashtag is #spoonie. Click on the hashtag #spoonie to see what I collected

I'm Chronically Ill And Afraid Of Being Lazy - Article Esme Wajung Wang

I own a teacup that has the words every day I'm hustlin' scrawled around the rim. Filled with bow-shaped paper clips and other ephemera, the teacup sits on my desk as a reminder: to work hard, to keep going, to aim high, and prioritize productivity. Yet it is only at my elbow for an hour at a time at most; most days, I can only see the self-satisfied teacup from my bed. For the majority of each day, I am in one bed or another. Much of that time, I'm lying with my eyes closed and listening to an audiobook. I am not, in fact, hustlin'. I am a chronically ill woman, stuck on the sidelines.

It's said that the disabled are the largest stigmatized population of which any person can become a member at any time. This frequently comes to mind when I see people on social media speak with a certain amount of pride about hustling so hard that they haven't slept more than a few hours in a week. When I see women that I admire scoff at the idea of self-care, I shrink because I'm often reading their words on my phone while lying in bed, engaging in the most intense self-care that I can manage.

Should things be just a little bit different, I'd be right there alongside them. After all, my work ethic and ambition haven't gone anywhere, despite my dedication to doing nothing for hours per day. It's my work ethic and ambition that call my "doing nothing" laziness; and laziness, or sloth, is cause in our go-go-go society for shame of the highest order. In "On Productivity Anxiety," writer Rachel Vorona Cote recounts her need for "ritualistic assurances" of productivity from her husband. "Did I work enough today? Did I seem productive?" are the questions she asks of him before ultimately falling asleep. In a society that holds productivity as unequivocally good, to do less feels like a moral failing.

I dream of a future self, in remission and free of illness, who uses her pink Goal Digger pencil case without self-consciousness. Though it might be better to realize my worth outside of productivity, I continue to live in a society that praises the art of getting things done over all else—including wellness and rest—and these are values I can't seem to shake.

Perhaps the solution is to view what I am doing through a different lens. My work, although it may not look like work to most, is to take care of myself. I must care for my health with as much attention as I once paid to the documents I was hired to edit, or to the long hours spent at the office on Saturdays. Aggressive pursuit of one's ambition is a skillset that, I hope, has not left me. In the meantime, I am aggressively pursuing a dream of recovery.

I wish I lived by the spoon theory. Counting my spoons and being okay with not cleaning or not finishing everything but as I'm referring to the article from Esme Wajung this is me. I feel to lazy if i'm doing nothing but my body is asking to rest. Before I did not admit to this and then I could get sick or get inflammation out of a sudden. When I really ignored it for a while I even got a septic shock from a inflammation. I figured out that self-care for me is just resting my mind and not caring about the homework or dishes even though I decided to study and have a job I also have to intervene my sick identity and give my some rest.

Why Isn’t Pain a Feminist Issue?
Article - Paula Kamen

As I have dealt with my own secret chronic pain problem over the past decade, I noticed more and more women my age also living double lives. One after another, Tired Girls “came out” to me in separate situations about an invisible illness involving pain and/or fatigue, making me slowly realize the large numbers all around me. In fact, just about everyone has a Tired Girl in their family, even if they don’t yet know it. I had thought I was a freak, but I was actually part of a huge closeted group, one which I wouldn’t have noticed if I weren’t in a similar situation.

Like me, they were private about their problems, which were poorly understood and diagnosed by science. Medical professionals—and the public at large—dismissed their problems as mere “women’s complaints.” Instead of fearing that they were “hysterical” because of media hype about their illnesses or some kind of subconscious cry for attention, I saw the opposite: Like me, they were usually isolated with and shamed by their problems and worried that they were the only ones with them.

Like many of these others, I seemed to also pay for everything I did, such as with having to crash the next day. They also shared my fixation with a limited number of “marbles” (my term for energy reserve units) and constantly worked to ration them wisely. They wasted weeks, and often months, of the year experimenting with new and often totally useless and horrible-side-effect-laden drugs.

Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from other problems (with even worse names) like irritable bowel syndrome, a condition experienced by 15 to 20 percent of the population, and are 2.5 times more likely than men to have rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder affecting about 1 percent of the population. They are .5 to 4 times more likely as men to have osteoarthritis, a disorder typically striking up to 80 percent of the population after age 65. And they are nine times more likely to develop interstitial cystitis, a chronic and often painful inflammation of the bladder which affects about .5 percent of the population.

Further, a doctor might say a female patient “claims” to have pain, while stating that a male patient is “experiencing” pain. Although they had the best intentions, some feminists in the ’70s and ’80s acted as adversaries of female pain patients, denying their realities as valid. I have only noticed this after experiencing pain myself, when I have recently reread such authors I had previously never questioned. For example, one of my most dog-eared books is the 1978 (and recently reissued) classic medical-industry critique For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Doctors’ Medical Advice to Women, by women’s health movement pioneers Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English.

As feminists, we’ve fought against other realities we once shrank from naming, such as “workplace harassment” and “sexual abuse.” In the beginning, these struggles also sounded highly suspect, and even absurd, in the greater society. As women, we dared to name problems that were previously accepted as “just life,” as Gloria Steinem has quipped. While a new name for an old problem may raise red flags of suspicion, we have to realize that in every era, the naming and classification of diseases has always been political, and it will only continue to be so.

Woman are twice as likely to suffer from disease. But woman are also likely to taken less serious when visiting the hospital or the doctor. Me myself I experienced this multiple times on ICU, by nurses or by doctors. I don't know if it is because of that I am a woman. I even experienced that a doctor was surprised that I could understand my own disease because he thought every person born with a heart disease also has down syndrome.

Projects related to disabled bodies

A archive that should not exist came a live from comments posted on a gofundme page. medical fundraisers are something that should not exist in general. We should all have the right to get the medical care we need. Sadly we don't have.

That's why it is a archive that should not exist.

#Hospitalglam is about taking the shame of having a treatment and show yourself in one selfie at a time. At the moment #Hospitalglam is not on tumblr anymore but you can find it on Instagram. Under this you can find a couple #Hospitalglams screenshots from Instagram.

Archive that should not exist

Amy Berkowitz
(click on the article)

My sculptures are like shrines to my treatments

At the helm of the jelly-as-art movement is the Canadian artist Sharona Franklin, who has her first solo show in New York’s King’s Leap gallery this spring. Franklin’s delicately coloured jellies presented on dainty serving dishes often feature flowers and herbs, a reference to her childhood growing up on the edge of the British Columbian wilderness.

She goes into the forest and find plants, like Canadian thistle or wild asparagus,” says Franklin, one of eight siblings. “We’d hunt rabbit and grouse, go fishing, look for clams. It was a do-it-yourself upbringing.” In her teens, Franklin moved to Vancouver for medical care. She works from home focusing on pieces that combine a childhood love of the outdoors with nuanced references to her disabilities. At first glance, her creations, filled with lichen or sprigs of baby’s breath, appear botanical, but by using gelatine, a bovine byproduct, Franklin makes a statement about today’s wellness culture and the animal-based drugs that she needs to survive.

How many times is disabled or chronic illness found in fashion? Gucci stole the idea of Sharona Franklin. They contacted her about a collaboration but when she was starting to explain she was sick out of a sudden their was no budget to work with her. See screenshot from Diet Prada

Because our group research is about our inner body knowledge and (sense-self) identities. I collected images, objects and papers. I collected everything I could find in my archive with the proof of me being disabled. At some you see it clearly, at some you have to know the location or the specific day to understand.

People think that people with chronic disease are free from the disease when they have no symptoms. But for the disabled it is something they wake up with everyday. To feel less switched between my 2 identities it was a painful journey and a relief for me to collect the images in my archives and put them as one.

I'm a white female. So calling it switching to identities is maybe not the right phrase. For me the right phrase is more a unseen identity. I have been taught from a young age to not show my disabilities to the world because there is no space in society to be sick if I want to succeed. It is not always easy to keep a mask on all the time. Because at a certain point it even made me more sick. Being sick is not how I like to call it. Since i'm young it is a part of my identity. But growing into a woman I have to find a way to keep up with school, work and my social life. Since the age of 19 I really realize I'm a disabled woman. I find it not easy to do my household, do my homework, work 20 hours, maintain a social life and in-between I also have to find my moment of rest and self-care. My moments of rest are mostly everyday laying in the bed from on 8:30 if i get to manage to do everything before hand. Lately with Corona I'm lucky because I can also stay a little longer in bed before I start my day. But staying to much in the bed also makes me tired. It is like their is not one way to feel okay. Everyday has a different approach. If you look on my Instagram my disabilities are unseen. That's the reason I called it unseen images from my personal archive. I decided myself what to show on media but behind my images is much more going on.