ABSTRACT
This is the most personal of the chapters in my book. By drawing a parallel between physiotherapy as a practice that ‘unmade’ me and psychoanalysis as a practice that has necessarily had to repeat the original wound, I investigate the issue of how we can really undo the knot of internalised oppression. In order to examine the speculative question of what rehabilitation might feel like from the point of view of a young child, the chapter juxtaposes discussion of my personal experience with analysis of a disturbing and disorienting film about forced ‘remaking’ – Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011). It takes up a question I posed towards the end of Chapter 3, in which I queried Butler’s insistence that the injurious power of speech is also the making of us as subjects that are capable of ‘counter[ing] the offensive call’ (1997a, p. 2). Reflecting on the paradox of speech as that which masks, as well as that which can unveil, I examine the place of language as a ‘“second skin”’ (Bick, 1968, p. 484) in my own belated experience of coming to inhabit a self that can take up a position of resistance.
