Transcript: DR. MIMI KHÚC on Claiming Unwellness /304
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we're speaking with Dr. Mimi Khúc.
Dr. Mimi Khúc My interest is how do we actually make space for unwellness that we're not allowed to talk about? How do we make sense of it? And then how do we care for each other in all of that, unwellness? Recognizing that I'm unwell, you're unwell, unwell in different ways, sometimes, but sometimes also very similar ways. And that sort of broke down the power relationship and hierarchy between professor and student for me quite a bit in asking that they recognize my unwellness as I recognize their unwellness.
Ayana Young Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell and visiting professor in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the managing editor of The Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health. She is very slowly working on several book projects, including a manifesto on contingency in Asian American studies and essays on mental health, the arts, and the university. But mostly she spends her time baking, as access and care for herself and loved ones.
Dr. Khúc, I am so grateful to have you here today. I'm really looking forward to being in deep conversation as spring is awakening around us.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk as well, I love talking about mental health. So I'm glad to have the opportunity with you.
Ayana Young Yeah, me too. Such a deeply important topic, especially at this moment. I thought it might be helpful to ground this interview in your practice by reading a Tarot card from your Open In Emergency collection that spoke to me if that’s alright with you. I'm gonna start with the farmer because it just feels of this moment, especially for me in this spring season.
The Farmer is the tenth card of the major arcana. She is an observer of both micro and macro shifts in energy and imparts her wisdom to those willing to put in sweat equity and passionate about growth and change. Sometimes mistaken for an unskilled laborer to be exploited, the Farmer is highly skilled with generations of knowledge to impart. Though the most familiar image of the Farmer is of Big Ag and industrial growers, this image highlights the small-scale, non-GMO grower whose mission it is to keep seed, soil, and community healthy. The Farmer holds tools of the trade, a shovel and nón lá. This indicates the time it takes to accrue knowledge, reminding us we must develop skills rather than assume they are preordained. The Farmer is practical: hair pulled back, long-sleeve shirt bleached by sun, sturdy work pants and head covering. While deeply connected to the pulse of the earth, she is also a thoughtful risk-taker, using observation, generational knowledge, and intuition to cultivate and prosper. The Farmer is always an indicator of personal and communal growth. Like the three sisters who bloom in harmony, corn provides the stalk for beans to climb, making a trellis for sister squash, this card in the Tarot can indicate that to regain your strength, you must equally provide it to others.” And that was written by Simi Kang.
I just want to take a moment for listeners to sit with that. And then when you're ready, I would just love to hear how this card speaks to our current moment and dreams for a changed future.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Thank you so much for that beautiful reading. So yes, the text was written by Simi Kang who is a scholar, ecojustice organizer, and dear friend of mine. The artwork on the front of the card, which listeners cannot see, is an ink and watercolor, black and white image of a farmer. And that was also actually drawn by Simi Kang, who's a visual artist as well.
I love that you picked this card, and I love this card for many reasons. I think our relationship to farming, to the Earth, is quite complex historically. And I think Simi here, this card is trying to draw on different kinds of historical moments and different communities and how they've navigated creating food, creating space, how they've navigated the industry of food as well, and how that's kind of devastated certain communities. But what I'm leading with, and I'll say with my tarot cards, there's no right or wrong interpretation or answer, it really is what speaks to you in the moment. And in this moment, actually love the very very last line that you read. This card in the tarot can indicate that to regain your strength, you must equally provide it to others. I love that because I feel like we often think about self-care, or even therapy, or even medicine as an individual kind of issue where we have an individual pathology, and then we treat ourselves in some way. We take care of ourselves in some way. And I love this framing of care as reciprocal and collective. And so much of my work grounds its ideas about both wellness and unwellness in the collective structures of care, and interdependence, meaning the ways that we lean on each other. So I love that this feels actually kind of prescient when I read this card now.
Ayana Young Yeah, I love how the themes that you spoke about are brought into ritual through the arts. And I think that gives us space to reflect on these themes in a different way that I really appreciate because I think it's really easy to get lost in the overwhelm of what's not working, and then overwhelmed in how we can make things feel more healing.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Because everything feels like it's on fire all the time. And how do we find agency in that, when everything is going wrong around us? Especially right now in this kind of acute crisis of the pandemic, or this ongoing, acute crisis of the pandemic? How do we take care of ourselves and each other in this moment?
Ayana Young Yeah, that brings me to wonder about the title, Open In Emergency. And I wonder if you could speak to how you came to that title for this tarot deck, and it feels like it's speaking to some of the themes you just brought up?
Dr. Mimi Khúc Yeah, thank you for asking that. So Open In Emergency is, I like to call it, a hybrid book/arts project. It's not quite a book. It's a box with cool stuff in it, including a tarot deck that I curated. I first published this project in 2016, and then I republished a second edition, in 2019/2020. And the idea of the project was to engage mental health in new ways, to think about what are the conditions of wellness and unwellness for Asian Americans, in particular. The project focuses on Asian American mental health. And how do we find new languages to capture what hurts, to capture all the ways that we are unwell, beyond the kind of limitations of psychological and psychiatric discourse? Especially, how do we think about race and colonialism, Empire, and other forms of structural violence that deeply shape our sense of wellness and unwellness?
So I curated this project with a bazillion contributors, probably around 80, which I do not recommend anyone ever do. It's a lot of people to corral and a lot of stuff to have to logistically handle. But people were amazing and contributed amazing things to it, like this card that we just read, in order to try to figure out from the tools that they had, how to diagnose our unwellness, how to think about ways of healing, how to think about ways of caring for each other. So I decided to name the project, Open In Emergency because it was a box. And some people have called it a self-care kit, which I don't call it that but I like that people call it that. I think people think of it as a tool. It's a box that you open with stuff in it that's supposed to help give you language, it's supposed to help you engage in finding new language on your own as well. And you open it when you need help.
So I thought of the idea of, you know, we have an open in case of emergency, random things that we're supposed to open when it's an emergency, like the emergency fire extinguisher and things like that. Well, for mental health, what is the emergency? Where's the emergency? And if you look at communities of color, and other marginalized communities, we are always in crisis, it's always an emergency, because we're always dealing with historical and cultural structures that are harming us. And so care shouldn't just be when we are in the hospital, for instance. Care should be ongoing all the time for all the ways that we are dealing with unwellness and wellness. And so I named the box as a care kit like open in an emergency, you open it when you need help. But with the framing that it's actually always an emergency, it's already an emergency, you should have already been engaging these kinds of art tools for your and your communities wellness.
Ayana Young Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. And I was watching your TEDx talk titled The Revolution is in the Heart and you say we can use “feeling as a political, ethical, and spiritual method.” I'm interested in the ways you see feeling used in contemporary frameworks and the path we might take to feel more deeply and to even decolonize our frameworks of feeling.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Yes, I love the language. I love “decolonize our frameworks of feeling.” Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to get at. I think we sort of have a sense that our ideas or our thoughts are shaped socially, right? Like we think certain things, we believe in certain things in part because of our socialization. But I think a lot of people don't realize that we feel things because of our socialization as well. Our feelings are actually quite structured by what we think we're allowed and not allowed to feel, what kinds of feelings are nurtured? What kinds of feelings are supposedly appropriate or not appropriate responses to things? Like is anger an appropriate response? According to whom? And who gets to say, right? What are people feeling now, during the pandemic? Are we focusing on grief? Are we allowing people to have space to mourn all the different things that we've lost in this pandemic?
And so I think of feeling as political because our feelings live in a web structured by rules about what we're allowed or not allowed to feel. And so deeper feeling requires that we understand what those rules are - we have to investigate what those rules are and evaluate whether they actually serve us or not. Do the rules around us deaden our feelings? Do they push our feelings in certain directions and not others? How do we expand our sense of feeling? How do we find new ways of feeling that move us possibly towards a more ethical way of being in the world? And I like to think that I create spaces of feeling as part of my work. So this project should elicit feeling through folks, in folks.
But I also do a lot of talks and workshops on Zoom a lot, where I try to create spaces of vulnerability and feeling because I think that when we can be vulnerable, access our feelings, and share our feelings collectively, that is when we're actually being honest about all the ways that we're unwell. Instead of pretending that we're well, there's a lot of pressure to pretend that we're okay. I call that compulsory wellness, we have to pretend we're okay, that we have our shit together, that we can do everything. Because if we don't, we think something's wrong with us. We're told that something's wrong with you if you aren't productive, or aren't handling things, or aren't resilient. I also hate that word, resilient. So if we allow ourselves and give ourselves and each other permission to say that we're not okay, that stuff is hard, that we don't know what to do, then we can actually start caring for those things. Because if we're in denial that we're feeling those things, we can't build the care that we need. Does that make sense?
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm thinking about the ways in which capitalism and productivity are directly connected to us needing to fake it till we make it or something. Because the dominant culture wants us to be well enough to be productive to keep the machine going. But they want us to be sick enough so that we are buying the shit we don't need or want. It's kind of an abusive relationship. It’s interesting to think about that push and pull.
Dr. Mimi Khúc And that push and pull works together when you privatize care and individualized care. So be like you're saying be well enough to work, define wellness through work. You're only sick if you can't work, apparently. But then, if you need care, be sick enough that you will access commodified forms of care for yourself. So self care, via things you can buy, via programs that you can access, and it not actually be a structural condition or a structure that the collective provides. It becomes an individual kind of relationship with capitalist forms of care.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm thinking about a thread on this tapestry we're speaking to which is pathologizing unwellness, or mental illness, and I see the necessity and the power in admitting that we're not well, and not sitting in denial so that we can find healing. And at the same time, within the dominant culture's framework of institutionalized health care, I see that so many of us are pathologized into being not well, but in a way that ostracizes us or makes us feel not right or something. And so I want to speak to the nuance between accepting our unwellness but not feeling like we are being pathologized and put into boxes - it’s sensitive to find the words for this but I hope you know where I'm going.
Dr. Mimi Khúc So I actually think you're touching on a couple of key tensions when we're thinking about being unwell and claiming unwellness and admitting that we're unwell. Because on the one hand, like you're saying, it shouldn't be pathologized, it should be totally fine to be unwell because honestly, we are all unwell. And that's a core point of my work is that we are all differentially unwell. We're unwell in different ways at different times, we're all going to get sick and die, sorry to break it to folks, but you will die at some point.
And so unwellness is built into our experience of life. But we pathologize it, like we were saying earlier, we feel that we're supposed to be well, and we perform that wellness often through productivity and the ability to work and feeling like we're independent and self-actualized and self-reliant. But the tension is in the ways that structures actually make us unwell. Structures of violence make us unwell, the way we have to navigate lots of awful laws and institutions and cultural forces around us make us unwell, too.
So how do you balance between recognizing the structures that make you unwell, and accepting that you're unwell? Because I don't want to accept all the awful structures that make me unwell. So I try to think about the human condition as one of navigating unwellness at all times but different people have to navigate it in different ways because of their relationship to different structures of power. So there are things around us that disable us, and things around us that enable us. And what are the ways in which we are disabled by our environment? And what are the ways that we are enabled by our environment? And how do we navigate those things? And how do we not pathologize illness, pain, and wellness while also trying to create structures that enable us to have better lives as well.
Ayana Young I’m thinking through what I learned from movements for disability justice, and I'm particularly drawn to the fluid, compassionate, and interpersonal work of theories and methods like Spoon Theory, a visualization of how energy and capacity varies from person to person, and from day to day. So on this note, I'm wondering if you can offer an explanation of how this theory shapes worldviews, and how embracing neurodiversity might bring us into a new realm of being with and understanding the world.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Yes, thank you so much for bringing up Spoon Theory. I love Spoon Theory, my students love spoon theory when I teach it to them. So Spoon Theory, when I did my own research into it, I found that it was started by Christine Miserandino in an essay where they're trying to explain their experience of lupus to a friend who does not have lupus, and how they have to manage their energy, figure out what their capacity is, make very hard decisions about how to expend that energy, the very limited amount of energy they have throughout the day. And so certain things take a certain number of spoons and you may even overextend yourself and then have to borrow spoons from the next day. And then the next day, you feel like shit, because you've used too many spoons.
And now you have to figure out how to replenish your spoons. So my students love this language for thinking about their own limits and capacities. Whether or not they identify as disabled. And that's for me, actually, what is most useful about Spoon Theory as a disability justice framework because it allows all of us to think about ourselves as having limits. We have limits, even though people seem to want to tell us that we shouldn't have any limits on our capacities, we'd be able to do everything. No, we all have limits, we have different limits, like you said, depending on the day, depending on our health, and depending on the things that are required of us at a particular given moment. And so recognizing that we have a limited capacity gives us permission to say something is too much, or to say I'm unwell because I don't have any more capacity for that.
So my students love it because it gives them language to think about how basically their institutions and universities are asking too much of them. And it also gives them a way to be agents about their own capacities and well-being if they can actually touch base with themselves a little better, they can check in with themselves: what is my capacity right now? Can I do that? And then it gives them language to communicate shorthand with somebody else. Oh, I don't have the spoon for that right now. And the person understands without having to come up with a particular reason or excuse, or rely on someone else's sense of what is a legitimate reason to do or not do something. Like the language of spoons allows all of us to kind of take back our personhood, and not be simply there for productivity but they're as a person with needs limits, how do we navigate both limits and needs individually, but also collectively?
Ayana Young That was really helpful for me personally, to hear you explain that.
Dr. Mimi Khúc I mean, so much of disability justice is the acknowledgment that we all have needs. And we all have needs and those needs deserve to be met, we have the right to have our needs met. How do we do that collectively? How do we build things that meet everybody's needs as much as possible? How do we negotiate, because people's needs may be different in a community? How do we figure out how to meet someone’s needs? And how do we iterate it, because needs change over time as well? And so this recognition of needs, I think, is something that we deny outside of disability justice often.
And so this is why disability justice informs my work in mental health, recognizing that we all have mental health needs. So then, how do we meet those needs instead of thinking about mental health simply as like, either you're okay or you have a mental illness that's diagnosed? Where we tend to think of mental health that way: if you have a mental illness that's diagnosed, that's labeled, then you can get treatment. And that treatment may be psychotherapy, or maybe psychiatric and pharmaceutical, or some other forms of treatment, possibly, instead of thinking about all of us as having the capacity for needing mental health support. We all have feelings, we all have thoughts, and so shouldn't we have support for those things at all times?
Ayana Young I'm thinking about an interview you did for Living Under Siege, which was conducted by Gin Hart. And you said, “My work in mental health has made me realize that we are all also inherently vulnerable, all differentially unwell, all struggling with varying levels and kinds of hardships, crises. For me, religion and mental health are inextricably tied.” I just want to hone in on that last sentence, which is saying that religion and mental health are inextricably tied. And I'd really love to hear you dive into that a bit more because I have my own feelings and thoughts on that. And I'd love to riff with you.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Oh, thank you for asking that, not many people key in on that and ask me about that. So I will give a confession since we're talking about religion. My training, my formal training is actually in religious studies, I have a Ph.D. in religious studies. And I actually shifted to doing work in mental health after I got my Ph.D. and kind of have built my career on mental health since then. But mental health and religion actually are not always connected for most people. But it was very clear to me because of my training in religious studies, and approaching religion not simply as an institution, or a set of beliefs, that's how some people define religion, right? As a church, or as a set of beliefs or a set of practices. For me, studying religion showed me that religion is an inherent part of life where we try to make sense of the world. It's meaning-making. That's sort of how I boil it down. And so meaning-making, to me, seems inherently part of our mental health. How do we make sense of the shit around us? How do we make sense of our relationship to the world to each other, to a sense of something maybe beyond this world, all of that is a kind of religious imagination or element of our lives. And it should and does connect deeply to our feeling life and our thinking life as well. Like they're not really easily separable, I think, our spirituality and our thinking and our feeling, they all work together.
Ayana Young Yeah, I also don't mention this, but I was a theology major. And so I really feel connected to that intersection and I absolutely think that we are in a spiritual crisis and that is directly connected to resource extraction, addiction, consumer culture, and exploitation of others and ourselves. And so I am really grateful you bring this up because I think that it's hard for many of us to be able to connect to religion or a collective spiritual community, because religion, organized religion, has been so problematic for so many, and has created a lot of pain globally. And then, many of us here in the United States, where I'm calling in from, we are kind of orphaned from our ancestry, which includes spirituality, and a connection to different Earth-based religions in our past.
So for those of us who are a bit lost, I can see how it would be hard to claim organized religion, and it would also be hard to claim some other spirituality that might look like cultural appropriation. I feel like some of us are left standing in this limbo between the discomfort with organized religion and not wanting to culturally appropriate somebody else's connection to Spirit. And so where do we go? I think, of course, we can find spirituality within ourselves and with the land. And I know, I've been on more of that individual journey. But I think at some point, it can get lonely, to just try to continue connecting to Spirit by oneself. And so I just want to leave that there for you and see if we can get into the weeds of how we find connection to spirituality or collective community. Worship, I know, could also be a triggering word but something together that feels like we're connecting to something divine.
Dr. Mimi Khúc I really appreciate what you've laid out. I think you're spot on. And I love you calling it a spiritual crisis, using that language. And the two kinds of forces are the two kinds of options or tensions that you're pointing out: the difficulty some people might have with organized religions, maybe of origin like of their families, but then also, how to connect to maybe other things that are not organized religion, but do they actually belong to you? Are you allowed to connect to it? This question of cultural appropriation? What does it mean to mine our own histories or other people's histories for spirituality? So then what do you do?
I heard you say the kind of search individually can feel lonely and really hard. I actually think this is why tarot was having a resurgence. I feel like so you know, you read the tarot card that I curated at the beginning of this. When I was carrying the tarot cards, I was coming across many, many different reimagined tarot decks. And it's actually only proliferated since then, folks trying to engage tarot practice in new ways. And then I had to look into, well, what are the historical roots of tarot practice, and I found out that they originally were Italian medieval playing cards. So they weren't even used for spirituality originally, they were just like our 52-card deck to play with, and then eventually became repurposed or reclaimed for divination purposes.
Fast forward now to the last maybe, I don't know, 10 years, I'm seeing tarot grow more and more, especially in, I would say, communities of color, queer communities of color, with queer and trans folks, particularly. And I'm not a sociologist or social scientist and I haven't done surveys, but my sense of things from having conversations with people who are engaging my tarot deck is that that has become a practice, in part because of people's search for meaning and ways of engaging it and not just engaging it individually, but like you're saying, collectively. So there are communities around tarot, there are people who love giving tarot readings to each other. They are people who consult tarot. And also, I think, astrology has had a comeback to have ways of making sense of their lives in conversation with other people.
And I think that's partly what drew people to my tarot deck, as well. So when I reimagined the tarot for my project, I did it with Asian American experience and Asian American studies or knowledge-making in mind, because I wanted to think about what kind of tarot I could create using tools that we have in our community that could reflect my community of Asian Americans. And wouldn't that make a better set of tools for divination or for meeting-making if we drew upon our own experiences and knowledges.
And then when I made the deck, I found that people really engage with it in so many different ways. Some for personal kind of divination purposes, some for teaching and pedagogical purposes, some for community connection purposes, some for making sense of the real structural violence that happens in our lives because that's threaded throughout the deck. Each card taps into certain kinds of forces that shape our lives historically. And those all kind of mixed together for me as ways of trying to feed ourselves and nurture ourselves spiritually, in connection with others, with new languages, and new practices, if that makes sense.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's reminding me of an interview, Claiming Unwellness, that you did - Asian American writers workshop. And I am interested in something you were saying about how you approach these cards by drawing on Asian American categories. “We created The Refugee, The Migrant, The Ghost, but my favorite card is The Student.” And I'm wondering if you could touch on these different cards and how they came to be, and what was your thought process in that intersectional framework that you were creating?
Dr. Mimi Khúc So you know, those who are familiar with tarot, the Major Arcana is a list of 22 archetypes. And when I went through them in my curation process, I basically said, “Well, let's start backward.” If I was thinking about Asian American experience, what would those archetypes be? And so I came up with my own lists. And this was in conjunction with my partner, Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, who is the co-founder of the Asian American literary review and worked on this project with me. And the list that we came up with because both of us do Asian American Studies and work in Asian American arts and community, included things like the Refugee. Both of us actually come from refugee backgrounds, our families are Vietnamese American. And it made total sense to have a card that would not only capture the refugee experience but help us think about what forces shape that experience that also imbricate people who are not refugees, right? Because we want people to pull these cards and use them, and find meaning in them, even if you are not a refugee.
And so then we had to think about if we're talking about that card in particular, who could theorize this card? Who could write this card in a way that could capture some of that that we're looking for? And the person we came up with… Oh, and I have to say that this tarot deck my tarot deck comes with texts, which is unusual. Most tarot cards do not come with text, they only have an image and an archetype title. But because we were renaming the archetypes, it felt important to have texts that actually explain what the card means and what to do with it.
So the person we chose for “the Refugee” is a scholar and artist named Mimi Thi Nguyen, who does critical refugee studies. She's a professor at UIUC Urbana-Champaign. And I encountered her work and found that she was in her work, discussing the refugee experience and locating it in a much larger context than simply the usual ways we think of refugees as people who flee places and then go somewhere else. It's kind of a very simplistic idea about refugees. She was locating refugee experience in the context of war, Empire, colonialism, but also compulsory gratitude and debt: the idea that refugees are supposed to be grateful for being saved, even though refugees are created by conditions of war often by the places that we end up going to. Like, for instance, Vietnamese Americans coming to the US because the US was involved in Vietnam, right? So like, what the fuck are we grateful for?
But the language of gratitude shapes refugee experience so much, so I wanted her to express all of that in his card in a new language that would be more accessible to folks who may never read her book, for instance, her academic book, but might read this tarot and find some kind of connection to it. So the other cards you named, I think you might have named - I don't know what you name but like, maybe “the Foreigner” and “the Ghost” as other categories that make sense for us from coming out of Asian American experience. And then you mentioned “the Student” card. So I definitely am talking about the Student card. So the Student card is a card that we came up with in the expanded second edition. In part, because we didn't have one in the first edition, it increasingly made sense to try to capture the student experience as I was traveling around meeting students all over the country to talk about mental health. Once the first edition was published, I met probably 1000s of students at this point over the last few years, talking about their own mental health experiences, students are craving mental health resources, and mental health conversations that became very clear to me, as I was getting invitations to places and facilitating these kinds of conversations.
And so I wanted to capture what student unwellness, student striving, and student struggle look like for the second edition. Obviously, I am no longer a student, so I couldn't write this card. But I also didn't want to put it on one lone student to have to try to represent, you know, all student experience. So Lawrence and I decided to make this a collective card in that we actually started soliciting submissions with various prompts. Along my speaking tour at places I visited, I would ask students to write some things down, jot some stuff down, ideas and discussions around their experiences, and then they would share them with me. And then I assembled a student editorial team to kind of go through all of that raw material, and start crafting this card. And then I and Lawrence helped to finalize this card.
And since then, I've actually presented this card to students as I continue to speak in other places. And it's been really amazing to watch them engage with the card. And that kind of told me, does it speak to their experience? Does it help them make sense of their experience? Does it capture what it means to be a student in these times? And this card was made in 2019, and I've brought it around and showed it to students throughout the pandemic. And it's actually quite wild because I think the student experience during the pandemic has shifted a lot but this card still somehow manages to capture some of that experience. Can I read the card? Okay, so I'll give a quick visual description as well.
So the front of the card is a black and white ink brush image of many students kind of stacked on top of each other. There is one student at the bottom, bent over with other students on top of them and they're all kind of holding different kinds of student paraphernalia. So books, laptop, graduation cap, an abacus that's falling apart. And it has the number 29 at the top and the word The Student at the bottom. And then on the back of the card is white text over a teal background - and I will read the card.
“The Student is the twenty-ninth card in the major arcana, sometimes known as the lost card. The Student cried the day of graduation. They play one role for the Mother, another for schools, another as the Daughter, another for workforces, another as the Model Minority, another for the state, always in the pull of the annihilating void. The Student is, at essence, a note-taker: be grateful / always be ok / chase the promise of / this, for hours / never complain never be sick keep going / nothing is ever enough the work goes impossibly on / is college life normal stress? / what would it mean to leave / we are finishing our parents’ immigration stories / leaving behind the fact of living / we are not grades / a condition of what can’t / don’t feel guilty. Drawing the Student card in a reading reminds you that Student debt extends forward and backward across our collective lifetimes. But ask yourself, what is it you actually owe? Your entire personhood, and then more. We gave you your past, now give us your future. The Student urges us to refuse. If schools are a feeder system for churning out good citizens, embrace being a bad citizen. Embrace being a bad subject, a bad student, a bad child, a bad person: a revolutionary. Remember that the Asian American Movement was birthed in the fires of student protest. Written by students everywhere”
So yeah, I hope that is true to the student experience. The little fragments that I read, sort of in the middle of the piece, are actually quotes taken verbatim from student submissions, including where I said “Strike that.” I said that as a kind of auditory version of what I'm seeing on the page, which is an actual strike through the words. And I found that so powerful that students wrote things in their submissions, and then struck them out before giving them to me. Like, what does that mean? Does that mean you're not allowed to say that? Does it mean that you're saying it anyway, but then you have to strike it? So I felt like those spoke to what it means to be a student really powerfully.
Ayana Young I really am grateful for how your work is so deeply attentive to the needs of students. And I've heard you speak about the pedagogy of unwellness and embracing new ways of teaching and learning. And I'm wondering if you could speak to that, specifically this pedagogy of unwellness?
Dr. Mimi Khúc Yes, thank you. I've always centered students in my teaching, but I've increasingly centered them over the years. It became very clear to me in my first few years of teaching that student life is really hard and a lot of professors don't realize that, or maybe are in denial about that, I'm not sure. But it was very clear to me that my students were struggling, in part because they were Asian American students, and my work was looking at Asian American suicide. And so as I was looking at Asian American student suicide, it's undeniable the kinds of struggles that students are going through. Asian American students have some of the highest rates of suicide ideation. So they're sitting in my classroom, right? The same students are struggling. So how can you even have a classroom space while students are struggling with questions of life and death, while the only way for me ethically to have a classroom space, then is to deal directly with that. And to make this classroom meet the needs of students in that way, that is how to be responsive to students.
So being responsive to students, to me, felt like acknowledging their unwellness and creating courses that actually help them discuss their unwellness and then find ways of caring for themselves in each other. And that is what ethical teaching became to me. And so I started developing my teaching along this idea of if students are unwell, and I'm unwell, how can we be unwell together? And how can the classroom space and the relationships that we build here, help us move through the world in all that unwellness? Not necessarily cure us - I can't treat people or cure people, right? I'm not even sure that the medical world can do that. But that's definitely not my interest in the classroom space. My interest is how do we actually make space for unwellness that we're not allowed to talk about? How do we make sense of it? And then how do we care for each other in all of that unwellness? Recognizing that I'm unwell, you're unwell, unwell in different ways, sometimes, but sometimes also very similar ways.
And that sort of broke down the power relationship and hierarchy between professor and student for me quite a bit in asking that they recognize my unwellness as I recognize their unwellness. And as I worked from that framework, so much for me opened up about learning more about student experience and how, you know, I thought they were unwell. Well, I learned more about how they're unwell as they were able to open up and be vulnerable and talk to me about these things. And then I had to shift and iterate my teaching more to try to address these new forms of unwellness.
The pandemic has really pushed me to dig deep into what a pedagogy of unwellness could and should look like. And what creating access and care in response to that unwellness could and should look like, because the pandemic has thrown us all right into a crisis of care that helped me better see the needs of students, and make me realize that they probably needed this all along but we hadn't thought about our teaching in the before times necessarily in the same way. I wanted to address your need, but it took the pandemic, I feel, to really see what basic needs look like and how that has to really be met before we can do anything else in the classroom.
I feel like I learned from students so much, that the relationship I have with students really informs my understanding of how people hurt because students are so earnest about their experiences and so willing to examine their experiences, and so brave in the work of sharing it and then calling upon change. And so I like to say the students are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the ones telling us what's up, what's happening. And they're ones they're the ones that most likely are calling for a change of conditions, right? They care for ourselves and each other, and they're willing to do that work. And so I look to them, and their unwellness, first and foremost.
Ayana Young I’m so appreciative for your care and thoughtfulness.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Students are amazing!
Ayana Young Well, I wanted to speak to this theme - something around an opening to using magic and divination, not just as metaphor, but as a truly affirming practice. And I know that magic and divination can trigger people, it can excite people, intrigue people, some folks feel really at home with these types of ways of knowing or being. And I want to open the floor to you with this because I feel like it can go a lot of different ways. I feel like it's such an important and sometimes challenging topic.
Dr. Mimi Khúc I think you're totally right, that people have all different kinds of responses. I love the words, you chose triggering, and exciting, intriguing. I think that actually really does capture the range of experiences when we say magic, divination, or religion and spirituality, each of those words carries all kinds of meaning for people. I like to say, and I've actually always said that I'm a deeply religious person. But I actually don't participate in any kind of organized religion. And that feels strange to people. People tend to use the word religion when they mean organized religious practices, and then they tend to use the word spirituality when they mean not organized. But to me, they're kind of the same. And so identify as a deeply religious, deeply spiritual person, because I feel that I ask those kinds of questions of life. And I intentionally engage that kind of imagination, the religious imagination, the spiritual imagination, in my own life, to reflect on, what does it mean to be here? And what are my kind of ethical callings and commitments in this world, as I move through this world?
And for me, those questions are religious questions. And magic is another word, another construct that some people think is the opposite of religion, which I don't think is true at all. It's another religious system. And it may be that the different forms of magic may or may not resonate with folks, historically. But I like to think about engaging unwellness and wellness and meaning as acts of magic, as acts of practice, whether or not it comes out of a particular magical tradition. My partner's work is on ghosts directly. And so he can tell you all about ghosts and magic and ghost hunting from that kind of framework. But for me, I don't know about ghosts. I know he's all about ghosts. But I don't know about ghosts.
But I do know that when we ask questions of our own unwellness and each other's unwellness, and we push ourselves to care, and we do it together, magic happens. And that's very clear to me in the kinds of care that I'm able to witness. And the kinds of healing that I'm able to witness - healing is magical. Like, it doesn't make any rational sense in the ways that we can heal ourselves and heal each other and care for each other. And that, to me, speaks to the unknowable about our lives, right? We strive towards it, and we strive towards doing it together. Because that's the only way to really not be alone in this process. Does that make sense
Ayana Young No, it makes sense. And I think I want to keep following this thread with you because there's something I'm sensing about the loneliness, and being alone in this practice. And I guess my mind is spinning, but I can't slow it down enough at this moment to pull one thought out.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Yeah, well, I mean, magic, I don't want to reduce it down too much because there are many different magical systems where there are many different ways of engaging the world. But so much of it for me is about connection: the connection between people, between people and creatures, between the Earth, between human and human, between different dimensions of our lives, between our understanding of the imminent world versus a more transcendent world. And so it is a way of trying to connect those things. And you know, different historical systems connect different things in different ways. So I love that you bring up magic, because it helps me actually articulate in another way, my work. I joke that I make magic, but I actually kind of think I do, right, because my work is about connection to each other and to new ways of being with each other. And that feels magical, that that feels a creation, right there.
Ayana Young Yeah. I wonder, especially as you are steeped in academia, where magic fits into it?
Dr. Mimi Khúc Oh yeah, magic does not fit into that institution in very comfortable ways. I mean, like, my religious studies background, I was allowed to study religion, but you don't do it. You're not supposed to do the religion, you’re supposed to just study it. The doing part is not considered academic, right? When I first encountered tarot, it was at an academic conference. But the tarot wasn't happening in the sessions. It was happening at happy hour, right after all the academic sessions had finished. And it was happening between a lot of drinking and drunk academics hanging out and wanting to connect to each other and wanting to tell stories, and laugh, and make meaning, and think about the future together. And now, basically, my work is trying to make space for that in the academic space - make space for that kind of thinking and feeling and connection. Because why can't academic work also be imbued with that work?
There's something very colonialist to think that academically has to be completely rational and unfeeling - that's like totally out of the Enlightenment, the kind of European enlightenment, thinking about knowledge. And knowledge comes from all different sources and experiences in our bodies in all different kinds of ways. And so now, I tried to do tarot during academic sessions.
So I have a little story, I just came back from the annual Association for Asian American Studies conference, it was in Denver last week. And it's the first time we've had an in-person conference since 2019, right before the pandemic. So it was definitely like academics going wild. People were very excited to see each other, lots of squealing and hugging (masked squealing and hugging) which I participated in enthusiastically. But one thing that I did that is probably quite different for an academic conference is that I organized a session on collective tarot making.
So similarly to the Student card that was created collectively, I and my partner, Lawrence, organized the session to create two new tarot cards with the participants their lifetime, around two new books that friends of ours published in order to capture those ideas in those books and create another form that those books could live in, in the tarot card, that also accesses feeling and personhood and ways of being in the world differently. And that doesn't seem like an academic thing but is totally an academic thing. And it was such a powerful experience to bring a feeling into a space that we don't normally think should have feelings, or should have magic, or should have a connection in those ways. So I'm trying to shake it up.
Ayana Young I appreciate you doing that feels really refreshing and true. There's something authentic about that, to not compartmentalize our humanity and our feeling senses from our rational work, because I don't think we can ever be truly objective. We're bringing our experiences to everything we do. We are molded by our belief systems and our childhoods, and so I think it's kind of ridiculous to imagine that we can be these purely rational beings at times and not bring everything else with us.
Dr. Mimi Khúc It’s a really limited - a limited way of understanding humanity, human experience. We are not reducible down to rational thinking. We have many other elements of our human experience and human life. And so how do you do knowledge production that actually accesses all of those realms of your experience, that actually captures a full humanity, instead of just this one sliver that we think is rigorous? Rigor is the word that I also hate. In academia, the idea is that it's only rigorous work if it engages, like you're saying, objective rationality. But I want to argue that there is something called emotional rigor, right? That there is hard emotional work that has to happen and can happen and should happen in academic spaces. There's thinking work, yes, but there's feeling work as well. And there's kind of the fancy academic word that would be “ontological” meaning ways of being. There's feeling work that can happen, and that can be really hard and rigorous as well, it just doesn't look the way that we think we're supposed to look. So I want to expand our ideas about rigor, and not be limited simply to that kind of rationality and supposed objectivity that you mentioned.
Ayana Young And on this thread of magic and academia, I also wonder what your thoughts are around the intersection of magic and science. And I think to some people, this could make a lot of sense. And I think to others, they would think it's blasphemy, that those two things do not go hand in hand, or they're they don't touch each other.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Okay, I love this question. I love it. But also, I think what you just said really points to the truth of the matter. You said it's blasphemy to put those two things together. And I want to say who is it blasphemous to? Actually, I think it's probably more blasphemous to the scientists, which then reveals to us that science is also a knowledge system, and a system of making sense of the world, and therefore it is also a religion.
And this is actually - so I used to teach an intro to religious studies course many years ago. And that was one of the big questions, like what counts as a religion? What is religion? And is science a religion? We came back to that question over and over again throughout the semester, and at first, students were like, “of course not, science is the opposite of religion.” My atheist students would definitely say that and that by the end of the semester, it was not so clear-cut anymore. If religion is a way of making sense of the world with particular rules, and science has very particular rules, but they are constructed rules about how we understand the world, how we create knowledge, how we access knowledge, and how we find it.
And so I think magic and science, for me, are two systems of making sense of the world that just use very different rules and very different ways of understanding: where knowledge comes from, and how we access it, and who are kind of agents in that process. I'm not saying I don't believe in science, especially at this moment. We have a lot of science deniers at the moment. But I do think that we need to think of science as a system of knowledge-making. Just like we think of other forms of religion as systems of knowledge-making and meaning-making.
Ayana Young I really like the way you said that systems of knowledge-making. I'm going to ruminate on that. I guess these conversations of infiltrating academia and science and pulling apart these systems that are very firm or tight in their structure.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Yeah, rigid in their boundaries.
Ayana Young Yes, rigid. Yeah. That's a great way to say it, and I'm thinking of you speaking a lot about hacking the DSM, and how Open In Emergency is a type of hacking. And so I just want to kind of explore that a little bit because I was reading that, or I was listening to interviews where you have used that word, and it excited me to be a little subversive and to be a bit trickster in the ways we are playing with these systems of knowledge. And so maybe you could start by talking about your thoughts on hacking the DSM.
Dr. Mimi Khúc Yeah, yeah. So I do want to say there's like a whole field of inquiry that theorizes hacking that I am not accessing, and I'm not a very good scholar in that way. But besides that, I will say that my approach to hacking is actually exactly what you're saying, thinking about receiving systems of knowledge and questioning them, interrogating them. Like, is this the only way to know something, is this the only way to make sense of what is happening to us? What are the kinds of constructions and assumptions that are happening in the way that we think we understand the world?
And so for mental health, the DSM, or the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the psychiatry Bible in a way… This is so funny because - talk about how religion is a construction that labels all of our disorders and the symptoms and presentations and how you diagnose. And it is not, it cannot be the only way we understand our unwellness. It was very clear how limited it is, as a way to understand and so self-referential and positivist if that makes sense, right? Like people created the DSM, and it has changed over time, we're currently in the fifth edition. There are things that were considered disorders before that are no longer considered disorders, like homosexuality, right? Being queer is no longer considered a disorder, but it had been for a very long time.
And so these are constructions of human ideas about what counts as pathological and what doesn't. And not to say that unwellness doesn't actually exist, of course, unwellness exists, but the ways that we label it, the way that we measure it, these are constructions that are made up by people. And they are, for me, only useful if they're useful, right? They're only useful if they're actually helping us understand something better and giving us better tools. They're not sacred in and of themselves. We keep using religion words, so the DSM is not sacred to me.
And so I wanted to hack it, meaning, what does it look like to put the authority back into the hands of those who are being diagnosed? Like psychologists, psychiatrists, or the so-called experts of mental health - I'm not denying they have some knowledge, they definitely have some knowledge. But are the only people who can be experts on what unwellness and wellness look like? That seems absurd if they're the only experts. So what about the other experts, like people, like humanities scholars, like artists, like writers, like survivors? How would they find language for their experiences?
So then we hacked the DSM, meaning, we pretended that we tore out all the pages and put new ones in, and the new ones that I put in are by different experts. So by the artists, writers, humanities scholars, survivors, organizers, community folks trying to make sense of their world using different language than we're normally allowed to use. And so yeah, it is a kind of irreverence, it is a kind of trickster approach, because I don't think that any institution is sacred and everything should be questionable. And it only is helpful if it is helpful. If it's not helpful, then we should definitely question it.
Ayana Young Oh, Mimi, this has been such a fun and deep and meaningful conversation, and I'm really appreciative of all the places that you're able to go with us today. So thank you so much for your time and your expansiveness.
Dr. Mimi Khúc This was so lovely. Thank you so much. And yes, thank you for your expansiveness leading the conversation in so many directions, and helping me too to kind of tie a bunch of different things together. It was really lovely and wonderful.
Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today is by Jeffery Silverstein, Samara Jade, and Grief Is A River. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, and Julia Jackson.