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Essais Series #8
Disquieting: Essays on Silence (8)
How do our bodies speak for us when words don?t suffice? How can we make ourselves understood when what we have to say is inarticulable?
In Disquieting , Cynthia Cruz tarries with others who have provided examples of how to ?turn away,? or reject the ideologies of contemporary Neoliberal culture. These essays inhabit connections between silence, refusal, anorexia, mental illness, and Neoliberalism. Cruz also explores the experience of being working-class and poor in contemporary culture, and how those who are silenced often turn to forms of disquietude that value open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty.
Essays on Silence draws on philosophy, theory, art, film, and literature to offer alternative ways of being in this world and possibilities for building a new one.
In Disquieting , Cynthia Cruz tarries with others who have provided examples of how to ?turn away,? or reject the ideologies of contemporary Neoliberal culture. These essays inhabit connections between silence, refusal, anorexia, mental illness, and Neoliberalism. Cruz also explores the experience of being working-class and poor in contemporary culture, and how those who are silenced often turn to forms of disquietude that value open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty.
Essays on Silence draws on philosophy, theory, art, film, and literature to offer alternative ways of being in this world and possibilities for building a new one.
250 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2019
11 people are currently reading
544 people want to read
About the author
Cynthia Cruz
30 books48 followersCynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin (Alice James Books) as well as The Glimmering Room, Wunderkammer and How the End Begins (all from Four Way Books). She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellowship. An essayist and art writer, her first collection of essays, Notes Toward a New Language is forthcoming. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral student in Germanic Language and Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 9, 2019
Probably my favorite book of the year. As someone who spent most of their teens and twenties cycling in and out of hospitals it's exciting to see an mainstream essay collection that critiques the psychiatric system, classism, neoliberalism, capitalism, and anorexia & trauma & gender.
While Cruz is not trans she acknowledges being nonbinary/trans as having commonality with her experience of gender. I will admit to disappointment that the essay on anorexia and gender referred to anorexics in strictly female terms though I know it's a mental illness often seen in gendered terms.
Felt this:
My desire for a non-gendered body was a wish to exist in this liminal space both literally—between the socially recognized and sanctioned genders—and symbolically—to be able to return to a time when I had what I experienced as a pre-gendered body.
At the same time as I longed for this pre-gendered body, however, I wanted to inhabit the "nothing" of the in-between, the No of gendered being. I had no desire to be androgynous—which seems to me an active coalescing of both genders to the point where one is neither more male nor more female. I didn't want to be either of those; instead, I wanted to exist outside of, or between, those states of being.
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This perfectly describes my disillusionment with how I've been taught to explain my mental health experience:
For more than three decades, I took part in a variety of one-on-one therapies and group therapies. The aim was for me to share what was on my mind or in my life with a therapist who would respond with suggestions or critiques that would help fix me. Struggling with anorexia and anorexic thinking, I would, for instance, say I was fat. More often than not, I was told I was not fat; then the therapist would ask what I really thought, which was a mystifying question. I had just said what I really thought. From my therapist's responses, I eventually came to understand that what I thought—I’m fat—was wrong, that the therapist didn't understand or empathize with me, and that she was growing impatient.
Over the years, I began unconsciously to intuit what the therapist wanted me to say—I would talk, for example, about my specific day-to-day problems, such as what to eat, so the therapist could then feed me the culture's sanctioned solutions to these problems. I want to be clear: I didn't know I was doing this. I had so completely absorbed my many therapists' reactions and responses to me that I had, in a sense, become trained in behaving how they wanted me to behave. Rather than working to discover what was happening below the surface of my reactions, beliefs, and thoughts, and thus gaining access to who I was and then learning to embody this person, I was becoming more and more skilled at intuiting what other people wanted or expected from me and meeting these expectations. What I was learning from my therapists I was also learning from the dominant culture: it was not okay to talk about how I felt about myself and my being in the world.
While Cruz is not trans she acknowledges being nonbinary/trans as having commonality with her experience of gender. I will admit to disappointment that the essay on anorexia and gender referred to anorexics in strictly female terms though I know it's a mental illness often seen in gendered terms.
Felt this:
My desire for a non-gendered body was a wish to exist in this liminal space both literally—between the socially recognized and sanctioned genders—and symbolically—to be able to return to a time when I had what I experienced as a pre-gendered body.
At the same time as I longed for this pre-gendered body, however, I wanted to inhabit the "nothing" of the in-between, the No of gendered being. I had no desire to be androgynous—which seems to me an active coalescing of both genders to the point where one is neither more male nor more female. I didn't want to be either of those; instead, I wanted to exist outside of, or between, those states of being.
-
This perfectly describes my disillusionment with how I've been taught to explain my mental health experience:
For more than three decades, I took part in a variety of one-on-one therapies and group therapies. The aim was for me to share what was on my mind or in my life with a therapist who would respond with suggestions or critiques that would help fix me. Struggling with anorexia and anorexic thinking, I would, for instance, say I was fat. More often than not, I was told I was not fat; then the therapist would ask what I really thought, which was a mystifying question. I had just said what I really thought. From my therapist's responses, I eventually came to understand that what I thought—I’m fat—was wrong, that the therapist didn't understand or empathize with me, and that she was growing impatient.
Over the years, I began unconsciously to intuit what the therapist wanted me to say—I would talk, for example, about my specific day-to-day problems, such as what to eat, so the therapist could then feed me the culture's sanctioned solutions to these problems. I want to be clear: I didn't know I was doing this. I had so completely absorbed my many therapists' reactions and responses to me that I had, in a sense, become trained in behaving how they wanted me to behave. Rather than working to discover what was happening below the surface of my reactions, beliefs, and thoughts, and thus gaining access to who I was and then learning to embody this person, I was becoming more and more skilled at intuiting what other people wanted or expected from me and meeting these expectations. What I was learning from my therapists I was also learning from the dominant culture: it was not okay to talk about how I felt about myself and my being in the world.
January 7, 2021
i want literally everyone to read this book
January 25, 2023
These essays were fascinating & emotional. I especially liked learning about Cruz's life. Even though many of they had to do with Anorexia, I could relate, having been born with multiple birth defects I cultivated a an aversion to my own body, even hatred. Cruz is a strong voice for the voiceless & marginalized in our appearance-obsessed neoliberal world.
August 26, 2020
Cynthia Cruz has been one of my favorite poets for a few years now. The essays in Disquieting aided me in appreciating what is going on in Cruz's poetry. These essays also helped me to have more empathy for those categorized in our culture as mentally ill. One of the big ideas Cruz puts across is that people are labeled as mentally ill or anorexic, but these are imposed categorizations that are geared toward the end goals of our capitalist culture or neo-liberal values. The labels are used to determine treatment which is influenced by pharmaceutical companies with the end goal of resumed productivity, as our society defines being productive. Cruz's discussion about the La Borde clinic where patients actively participated in running the facility was utterly fascinating to me. The concept there was the creation an environment that was suited for the citizens rather than to exert pressure on them to conform to society's expectations. Really there was too much in this collection of essays to summarize now, but I was also intrigued by Cruz's discussion of how collage, montage, and juxtaposition in art expresses the experience of trauma. That discussion in particular, I think, will inform my re-reading of Cruz's poetry.
February 16, 2021
i told so many people about this book! it inspired me in my own artistic practice by asking questions about silence, neoliberalism, eating disorders and madness. cruz posits that it is "normal" to be mad in a neoliberal world and talks about how eating disorders are tied to the gendered body. asked questions i ididnt have answers for, answered questions i didnt have the words to ask.
November 15, 2024
Okay. So I started and stopped this many times. It’s a bit repetitive. But what it’s saying overall, peppered by Cruz’s own personal web of references and works of art, did come through to me.
I kept coming back to this thought of a third space. How many people just don’t like the binary choices of reality and life and how much suffering is eased by articulating or attempted to be articulated by the 3rd space. Have dealt with ED, SA and other topics in the essays myself it was hard to read at times. But I keep returning to writings that have these subjects attached to them almost in an attempt to make my own 3rd space. The ways refusal are political and an act defiant. I do love the way Cruz doesn’t seem interested in human history or legacy, but in the mappings of her own soul’s narrative.
The parts about The Hour of the Star, Anita G., Justine and the Bruegel paintings were powerful and the illustrations resonated. When Cruz attempted to discuss trans people I think she did REALLY poorly though. Cruz misses the first directive asked by trans people and focuses on trans masculine people. In an essay collection so intentionally discussing the feminine perspective (Cruz literally uses a generalized “she” unless discussing a specific man)- she becomes the binary space trans people seek a 3rd space for (yikes). The essay should have focused on trans women or been cut.
I do love that she used a universal “she” pronoun though. Kind of only want to read essays that do that from now on, just for my own personal existence.
I kept coming back to this thought of a third space. How many people just don’t like the binary choices of reality and life and how much suffering is eased by articulating or attempted to be articulated by the 3rd space. Have dealt with ED, SA and other topics in the essays myself it was hard to read at times. But I keep returning to writings that have these subjects attached to them almost in an attempt to make my own 3rd space. The ways refusal are political and an act defiant. I do love the way Cruz doesn’t seem interested in human history or legacy, but in the mappings of her own soul’s narrative.
The parts about The Hour of the Star, Anita G., Justine and the Bruegel paintings were powerful and the illustrations resonated. When Cruz attempted to discuss trans people I think she did REALLY poorly though. Cruz misses the first directive asked by trans people and focuses on trans masculine people. In an essay collection so intentionally discussing the feminine perspective (Cruz literally uses a generalized “she” unless discussing a specific man)- she becomes the binary space trans people seek a 3rd space for (yikes). The essay should have focused on trans women or been cut.
I do love that she used a universal “she” pronoun though. Kind of only want to read essays that do that from now on, just for my own personal existence.
February 12, 2025
“How silence manifests in the body, in the face and the mouth, and in the work of the artist— and how this silence is also, often, a form of resistance: these are my main interests here. I’m also deeply compelled by the idea of failure as resistance, as a decision to not engage in the world” (10)
“The unbecoming is the space where, I argue, the anorexic and others like her who are not at home in the world wish to vanish… the artist of unbecoming is the dropout, the loser, the one who no longer wishes to play the game, who no longer wants its prizes” (21)
Quoting Sarah Ahmed: “the work of repetition is not neutral work… it orients the body in some ways rather than others” (26)
“The unbecoming is the space where, I argue, the anorexic and others like her who are not at home in the world wish to vanish… the artist of unbecoming is the dropout, the loser, the one who no longer wishes to play the game, who no longer wants its prizes” (21)
Quoting Sarah Ahmed: “the work of repetition is not neutral work… it orients the body in some ways rather than others” (26)
September 26, 2019
so this was recommended to me by my dearest baby and it’s going to stay with me for a long time. cruz’s analysis and thesis are both academically based and intimately personalized and her history and reality emerge from the text like specters to not only haunt but to also insistently vitalize the ongoing melancholia and describe the possible hope that could rise out of capitalism’s rubble.
Read
December 6, 2021Ironically, what led me to this book was a pan of Cruz’s recent book, “The Melancholia of Class”, which I felt to be unfair. I wondered about what else she’d written, if any of it might explain what went “wrong” with “Melancholia”. Instead, I found “Disquieting”, a valuable contribution to a genre - Mad criticism - that merits a wider body of work and a MUCH a wider readership.
November 7, 2020
I learned so much from this collection of essays. Cruz explores trauma, neoliberal politics and different forms of communication without overtones of extraction and voyeurism. The writing on the Jewish History Museum in Berlin and spatial representations of memory was terrific.
July 24, 2024
Started off strong but I’ve got a couple of critiques.
I wish Cruz used anorexia to critique the Cartesian mind/body dualism that she finds in Descartes and Arendt, rather than uphold it.
And I only skimmed the last chapter.
Cool book though!
I wish Cruz used anorexia to critique the Cartesian mind/body dualism that she finds in Descartes and Arendt, rather than uphold it.
And I only skimmed the last chapter.
Cool book though!
May 5, 2020
Fascinating
April 5, 2022
Cruz articulates my thoughts so well, and adds to the list of things to ponder.
Read
August 30, 2025“All Bodies Are Classed” I resonated with the most
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews