by Margeaux Feldman
Beacon Press
9/9/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9780807019757
Reject the stigmas of trauma and chronic illness by fostering queer forms of intimacy--and embracing the many ways humans can care for one another.
The writer behind the popular @softcore_trauma Instagram offers a deeply personal memoir for folks seeking healing and better care.
The forms of intimacy and care that we've been sold are woefully inadequate and problematic. In a world that treats those who are sick and traumatized as problems in need of a cure, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman offers a different story.
Trauma, which all too often manifests as chronic illness, tells us that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in. A world that promotes individualism, fractures us from community through violence and systemic oppression, and leaves us traumatized. That is what we need to cure.
While unveiling their own lived experiences caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness, Feldman provides roadmaps for embracing queer modes of care, or "hysterical intimacies," that reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Feldman looks at the lengthy history of branding girls, women, and femmes-and their desires-as sick, from the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the 19th and 20th centuries. What emerges is a valiant call for rethinking the ways we seek healing.
This compelling blend of theory, personal narrative, and cultural criticism offers a path forward for reimagining the shapes and forms that intimacy, care, and interdependence can take.
Reviews:
"Tenderly written and courageously conceived, Margeaux Feldman's Touch Me, I'm Sick is a collection of essays that speaks deeply to readers on the levels of heart, head, and soul. Readers yearning for a vision of social justice that holds complexity and nuance are sure to find refuge in Feldman's care-filled words. This book is medicine." --Kai Cheng Thom, author of Falling Back in Love with Being Human
"In Touch Me, I'm Sick, Margeaux Feldman explores cultural responses to trauma and illness through a brilliant tapestry of research, criticism, and narrative. At once impressively rigorous and deeply personal, Feldman's gorgeous debut is a love letter and a guide toward radical care, healing, and belonging." --Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme
"A stunning antidote to the goofy wellness industry and its ever-shifting but unattainable purity-based health protocols, Touch Me, I'm Sick is an urgent demand for sickness selfies, ugly sex, and an intimacy undiminished--maybe even bolstered--by illness. An achievement." --Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
About the Author:
Margeaux Feldman (they/them) is a writer, a public educator, and an artist. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts and a PhD in English literature and sexual diversity studies from the University of Toronto. Their essays have been published in The Sonora Review, GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, PRISM, Rabble, and The Ex-Puritan, amongst others. They also created the online community Softcore Trauma, where they share memes and writing that testify to their experiences living with trauma and chronic illness. They currently live in Los Angeles with their 2 elderly cats. You can learn more about them on their website, www.margeauxfeldman.com, and read new writing from them in their newsletter CARESCAPES.