Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain (original) (raw)
Related papers
Transcending the dualisms: towards a sociology of pain
Sociology of Health and Illness, 1995
Theories of pain have traditionally been dominated by biomedicine and concentrate upon its neurophysiological aspects, both in diagnosis and treatment. Hence, scientific medicine reduces the experience of pain to an elaborate broadcasting system of signals, rather than seeing it as moulded and shaped both by the individual and their particular socio-cultural context. Although pain lies at the intersection between biology and culture, naaking it an obvious topic for sociological investigation, scant attention has been paid to understanding beliefs about pain within the study of health and Ulness. A major impediment to a more adequate conceptualisation of pain is due to the manner in which it has been 'medicalised', resulting in the inevitable Cartesian split between body and mind. Consequently, the dominant conceptualisation of pain has focused upon sensation, with the subsequent inference that it is able to be rationally and objectively measured. Yet as well as being a medical 'problem', pain is an everyday experience. Moreover, sociological and phenomenological approaches to pain would add to, and enhance, existing bodies of knowledge and help to reclaim pain from the dominant scientific paradigm. In this paper, it is argued, firstly, that the elevation of sensation over emotion within medico-psychological approaches to pain^can be shown to be limiting and reductionist. Secondly, we attempt to show how insights from the newly-emerging sociological arenas of emotions and embodiment provide a framework which is able to both transcend the divide between mind and body and to develop a phenomenoiogical approach to pain. Finally, in order to bring the meaning of pain into fuller focus, we draw attention to the importance of studying theodices and narratives, as well as the cultural shaping and patterning of beliefs and responses to pain.
Pain, Gender, and Systems of Belief and Practice
Religion Compass, 2011
In the Eurowest pain is discursively framed as something that eludes discourse and therefore is outside language. In this framing, pain, as outside language, is given a social and a historical status understood to be beyond human construction. This article is the first step in a larger project toward destablizing such a conceptualization of pain and begins by engaging feminist theorizing of body and pain. In this paper my effort is to trouble the way we think about the body and pain in the Eurowest and to examine some of the outcomes of such thinking. Thereafter, I propose a conceptualization of the body and pain that might be helpful for examining their discursive formation.
Giving In: Chronic Pain, BDSM, and Crip/Queer Utopia
2020
This thesis considers whether people living with chronic pain can reimagine their relationship with pain and challenge structural narratives that frame lives lived in pain as less worth living through participation in BDSM (bondage, discipline/Domination, submission/sadism, masochism). Using feminist ethnography shaped by cripistemology, I use crip theory to consider how chronic pain might be experienced differently in a context where interdependence is valued. I argue that by connecting work around queer temporality and José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of utopia to BDSM practices it is possible to think pain otherwise. Radical BDSM practices challenge the hermeneutical injustice of chronic pain by allowing people in pain to express it, share it with others, and be fully seen, while also encouraging interdependence. It is through this process that BDSM is one example of queer utopia: a space of potentiality where different futures and perspectives on pain can be imagined outside of straight/capitalist time.
2016
This article focuses on a sample of the artworks created by three American artists: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, whose collaboration also generated several performance pieces, and Catherine Opie, who mainly works with documentary photography. In the works analysed here, Flanagan/Rose and Opie use physical pain to tackle mental pain stemming from their different disabilities: for Flanagan it is the physical disability of his chronic illness, for Opie it is the "so-cial disability" of the stigma attached to her sexual orientation. Their works and their lives are strongly interconnected and the divide between private and public is blurred: the personal becomes political. Flanagan and Rose are able to com-plexify gender and sexuality through the use of BDSM and the redefinition of pain and pleasure. The outcome of their work focuses on the dynamics of their 24/7 sadomasochistic relationship and is the questioning of hegemonic masculinity and normative femininity. The reapprop...
A tapestry of pain: review of 'A Philosophy of Pain'
The Berlin Review of Books, 2012
Review of A.J. Vetlesen, 'A Philosophy of Pain'. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Veltesen offers an eclectic study of pain, mixing philosophical and cultural analysis. I divide his chapters roughly into three overlapping parts. These make sense of pain as an isolating experience, a shared aspect of the human condition, and a cultural phenomenon. Part I probes the pain which results from torture, chronic illness, and psychological trauma. Through these, Vetlesen provides a conceptual analysis of how pain changes our normal connections to the world, including to other humans. Part II is a phenomenological description of how pain is experienced. From it, he draws existentialist conclusions about our responsibility and vulnerability in the world. Part III develops a model of how pain circulates within society and how culture transforms this pain. He uses it to interpret two aspects of western culture: its violence and valorisation of choice. The published version of this article is available at: http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/phiccf
Performing the Pain: Opening the (Crip) Body for (Queer) Pleasures
With a view to interdisciplinary dialogue(s) between queer theory and disability studies, this article discusses the work of Bob Flanagan and his partner Sheree Rose. Specically, it focuses on their queer S/M practices as a strategy of negotiating disability/pain, but also as a practice rede ning notions of (disabled) embodiment. It also discusses Flanagan and Rose's queer/crip politics as an opening for "desiring disability."
On saying it hurts: Performativity and politics of pain
Meanings of pain. Springer, forthcoming., 2018
Pain and pleasure affect us all. Knowing this with empathy, and acting upon it, civilises us. Without such empathy, pain can become a means of domination and injustice. Moreover, pain is expressed and responded to in all social contexts, and the word " pain " has diverse meanings, depending on the associated activities. To observe various ways in which we say that it hurts, and the many meanings of pain, I follow ordinary-language philosophy, particularly Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, and I consider a range of social and historical contexts, from the closest intimacy, everyday chatter, the clinic, and beyond, to the domain of public policy and human rights. This addresses our verbal expressions of pain, their lived contexts and effects, within relationships and among social groups, altering mutual obligations, eliciting actions and reactions, and thence creating moral, legal and political norms. My aim, then, is to consider the social and political implications of ordinary performative pain-talk, in particular regarding the relationship between pain and justice, public policy, human rights and law.
Constructivist Foundations, 2022
Stapleton M. (2022) Pain as the performative body. Constructivist Foundations 17(2): 156–158. https://constructivist.info/17/2/156 Commentary on Smrdu M. (2022) Kaleidoscope of pain: What and how do you see through it. Constructivist Foundations 17(2): 136–147. https://constructivist.info/17/2/136 I unpack Smrdu’s kaleidoscope metaphor, putting it into dialogue with enactive work on the performative body in order to cash out how it can capture the qualitative differences of the experience of chronic pain.
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
Speaking of the monstrous or ‘foreign’ body archivally inscribed in culture, one notes a surfeit of imagery at play, a slideshow of supplementary images which both circumscribe and stultify any attempt to write or speak about the body outside of this code of foreignness. This paper argues that such an archive of etiolated body is shadowed by a similarly circumscribing archive of pain. Archives of pain, whether medical, cultural, literary, or ontogenetic, have long been conceived in terms of montage, a series of ‘signs, images, or ciphers’ belonging to the language of diagnosis. This code of diagnostic expertise constatively works to describe and inscribe pain as a supplement to inscriptions of bodihood which are themselves supplementary. This paper seeks to affectively map a shift away from constative taxonomies of pain and body image, towards an approach that ethically and aesthetically privileges the performativity of pain, the pain-act that speaks its suffering without recourse t...
2020
Counter-scripting the Body in Pain, An Artistic Interrogation into Pain as Practice, Site, and Subversive Force conceptualises and enacts forms of resistance to the human tendency to negate pain, drawing on methods and sensibilities specific to artistic knowledge and practice. Through a series of text-based artworks, this project offers alternative modes for probing, perceiving, and understanding chronic pain, challenging dominant socio-cultural attitudes that regard pain as something to avoid or resist. The tripartite series: May and the Potentiality of Pain (2014-2015); It’s Always Three O’clock in the Morning (2016); and Gibraltar, A Walk with Disturbance (2017) are at the centre of an exploration into the motifs pain as practice, site, and subversive force. The artworks were created in tandem with an ethical strategy for art pursued through an experimental art-writing strategy I have labelled counter-scripting. Elaborating and engineering affect through performance, the art texts of the three artworks challenge dominant individual and cultural tendencies to explain, suppress, and ultimately annihilate pain.