ABSTRACT
This article examines our supposedly most intimate relation – the one between our bodies, our language and ourselves. The author understands this complex partnership as a relation between “Intimate Strangers” and explores it through the experience of illness and that of the transgender patient. She focuses on the concepts of “bodymind” and “creationism,” which she perceives as cardinal to Motherhood in large and to the way we “mother” (care, mind) our bodies in particular. Hence, Eve's trespassing God's place (what the author calls “creationism”) is, in this view, a central pole in our dealing with our bodies as a strange intimate other in times of disease and in the process of gender transformation. Themes of confrontation, creation and protest are inevitable ingredients of these life events, where our bodies are sensed as either a “primeval matter,” as “the clay in the potter's hand” (Jeremiah, 18:6), or as a “finished product,” a datum, a kind of “dead end.” The theme of God is then conceptualized as the [absent] place humans construct while looking for their psychic home on earth – the home that would fit their body, soul and heart.
