Dr Francesca Lewis
Lecturer

Research

Overview

In my doctoral research, I focused on borderline experience, known clinically as borderline personality disorder. The study is an exploration of borderline onto-epistemology from a feminist neuroqueer materialist perspective. It focuses on dissociative experiences of self and identity in borderline experience, rather than the more commonly studied interpersonal and emotional aspects of BPD.

I worked with and advocated for the use of neuroqueer and feminist new materialist (Barad, Braidotti) approaches to expand existing pathologizing and stigmatizing understandings of borderline experience. My aim was to show how borderline knowledges might instead be valued as challenges to the very binary and Cartesian notions that underpin the Enlightenment ideals of psychoanalytic discourse. Using Karen Barad’s diffractive reading, I considered the borderline experiences of uncategorisability, indeterminacy and unreality through televisual and literary texts. I worked with an eclectic textual corpus, including the Netflix series Russian Doll, and the work of 20th century Latin American writers Alejandra Pizarnik and Clarice Lispector.

This was the first in-depth philosophical study of BPD written from a situated neuroqueer materialist positionality, and as such presents the borderline as a valuable site of onto-epistemological possibility, while offering a unique and accessible methodological approach to neuroqueer knowledges.

Publications

Selected publications

• “Reflection/Diffraction: Russian Doll (2019) and the Phenomenology of Being Borderline”, The Polyphony, March 2020.
• “The Borderline as Diagnostician: an autø/gnøstic reading of a history of binaries”, Journal of Psychosocial Studies (2023).
• “The Entangled Mess of the Embodied Elsewhere in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018)”, Violence Elsewhere 2: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany Since 2001 (edited volume, forthcoming with Camden House, 2024).
• “The Kaleidoscopic Value of Neuroqueer Knowledges”, The Polyphony, July 2023.