Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes's Safe

As it tells the story of a housewife who suffers from environmental illness, Haynes's 1995 film Safe asks if identities shaped by a relation to a particular form of physical disability or suffering are subject to the same forms of impasse and disidentification as are sexual differences. Following Jacqueline Rose's (1993) formulation of the “right to an impasse” (p. 15) at the level of sexual identity, the author asks if certain diagnoses might be experiences with similar forms of ambivalence. Insofar as diagnostic status can function as a vector of identification, why wouldn't it be possible to argue for the right to a diagnostic impasse? A feminist reading of illness needs to consider the moments in which impasse marks negotiation between the psychic and the social, a negotiation that must, however painfully, sometimes be allowed to break down.