In The Dreamhouse

In the works of Carmen Maria Machado’s “In The Dream House” and Jennifer Mullan’s “Decolonising Therapy” both writers reflect on the urgency of transforming trauma within intimate and institutional spaces linked to healthcare and juridical systems, transforming archival erasures into exit pathways through embodied experiences. They propose a radical shift of our relationship to our bodies and each other as the collection of ephemeral evidence, the emotional archives. Machado determines that the juridical court systems often fail to acknowledge the experiences of queer survivors inside environments of domestic and institutional abuse which stems from the heteronormative prejudices and neglect of global healthcare systems in responding to trauma and ephemeral evidence in migrant bodies. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 article “De-marginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of anti-discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and anti-racist politics” describes the experiences of migrant women which occur in movements that are framed by dominant narratives of discrimination. This marginalisation disregards intersectionality and in the context of Germany’s anti-racist policy discourse that fails to integrate within court and healthcare systems to date. These authors bring different frameworks of somatic collective trauma perpetrated by discriminative politic policies, racist healthcare systems and ineffective court judicial protection and safety that have pushed feminist activists like Semra Ertan and May-Ayim and queer publishing collectives like Conditions (1970) and Azalea (1980) archive the histories of mental health which has been entirely neglected inside our current public educational discourse. This erasure testifies to how migrant communities are erased from national data archives and how public health services deliberately ignore collective experiences rendering ‘peripheral’ populations insignificant.

The series reflects on the histories of discrimination in healthcare, archival erasures of migrant restitution work. These offerings focus on collective modes of somatic empowerment and healing with professional resources to guide trauma affected communities inside our The Dream House, as Machado proposes, is finding safe exit pathways and repair from those who have oppressed us.

In The Dreamhouse is funded by Berzirksamt Pankow. 

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