Pain, Gender, and Systems of Belief and Practice

Originally published in Feminist Theory, 6.3, 2005, I will be presenting a critical reflection on this original work and on Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain" at University of Brighton, December, 2015. Abstract: Appealing to theorists such as Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and Bibi Bakare-Yusef, the aim of the following is to show that, despite ongoing critique, Cartesian dualism continues to haunt our analyses of the relationship of the subject to embodiment, particularly with respect to the experience of pain. Taking Bakare-Yusef’s critique of Elaine Scarry’s account of institutionalized violence (slavery) as an example, I will argue, first, that the dualistic impulse which Bakare-Yusef identifies in Scarry’s view has deep historical roots in, for instance, Aristotle’s hylomorphic concept of the subject. Second, I will consider the specific relevance of poststructualist analyses of subjectification to our conceptions of violence. Lastly, I will explore some contemporary examples of pain in light of the question: Can violence ‘deconstruct the body’ without desubjectifying the subject? I think that the answer is a qualified , but certainly not an easy, “yes.”

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2013

ABSTRACTWhat is pain? This article argues that it is useful to think of pain as a ‘kind of event’ or a way of being-in-the-world. Pain-events are unstable; they are historically constituted and reconstituted in relation to language systems, social and environmental interactions and bodily comportment. The historical question becomes: how has pain been done and what ideological work do acts of being-in-pain seek to achieve? By what mechanisms do these types of events change? Who decides the content of any particular, historically specific and geographically situated ontology?

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2014

The article weaves together personal experiences of pain with critical readings of cultural discourses to make several key interventions into knowledge produced about/through pain. It brings together analytical processes of cripping and queering to trace the discursive systems that materially produce and structure experiences of pain, lay out a corporeally infused cultural analysis of pain, excavate the felt experiences of cultural discourses, and situate those experiences within a broader cultural politics of ableism, or what Tobin Siebers calls an ideology of ability.

Contemporary sociology mirrors Western society in its general aversion and sensitivity to pain, and in its view of pain as an unproductive threat to cultures and identities. This highlights the deconstructive capacities of pain, and marginalizes collectively authorized practices that embrace it as constitutive of cultural meanings and social relationships. After exploring the particularity of this Western orientation to pain – by situating it against processes of instrumentalization and medicalization, and within a broader context of other social developments conducive to a heightening of affect control – this article builds on Mauss’s analysis of ‘body techniques’ in suggesting that the cultural, physiological and psychological dimensions of pain can be combined in various ways. In examining this point further, we then compare contrasting religious engagements with pain as a way of detailing how it can be positively productive of cultural meanings and identities, and conclude by using these comparisons to illuminate the relationship between the current Western approach to pain and the Christian traditions that shaped the West historically.

This paper seeks to explore the way in which pain can find expression. Pain is invisible. It is difficult for us to express and recognize pain, and also it is very hard for us to explain what kind of pain we are in or how painful it is. Perhaps, it is time to seriously reconsider how we express our painful body and how medical practitioners can read our pains. Pain outruns and disrupts language and defies capture in medical discourse. We often feel vulnerable in front of medical practitioners, because we cannot explain how we feel. I aim to explore the expressions of those who suffer from chronic pains. This exploration of pain sufferers’ voices may enable strategies for the diagnosis and treatment of pain. In this paper I draw upon the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Julia Kristeva. First, I shall begin with a brief account of Wittgenstein’s account of bodily expression and question his argument that pain must always be publicly expressible. Second, I shall draw on Kristeva’s account of the semiotic, that is, an emotive realm of expression, deriving from to the body and bodily instincts. This paper develops the idea that the expression of pain is semiotic, that is, something that the ‘symbolic’ (language) constantly attempts to restrain and fix, because pain disturbs cautiously fixed conceptions of the ‘healthy (normal) self’. In order to describe a Kristevan way of expressing pain, I shall examine how embodied experience is depicted in Deborah Padfield’s photographic art work Perceptions of Pain (2003).

In this text I describe my encounters with the ideas of Veena Das while conducting research on suffering and violence. In the process, I revisit the trajectory that led to my investigation of these themes through memories of Brazil's military dictatorship , highlighting the points where her work made itself present. The catalyst for this reflection was the invitation to participate in this dossier on the author who pioneered new ways for contemporary anthropology to think about violence, becoming an essential reference on the theme, particularly when the focus is on pain. Here my reflection on Veena Das's work will not take the form of an exegesis or an analysis of its fundamental aspects and lines of continuity. 1 Instead, I describe the points of encounter in order to show how reading her work opens up possibilities for research on the Brazilian dictatorship, specifically in the terms in which I have formulated this on-going inquiry. To this end, I revisit the questions that led me to investigate the suffering associated with violence, such as I had in mind when I began the research, and describe how the reflection on testimonies of these experiences developed over time, set in words (books, testimonies, texts, reports, interviews), emphasizing the moments when the reading of Veena Das (2007: 1, especially Life and words, was particularly inspiring due to the singular way in which she proposes to think about the kind of work that anthropology does "in shaping the object we have come to call violence." The impact of her work discussed here, therefore, concerns

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2016

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.

Gestalt Theory, 2017

Summary This paper develops a phenomenological approach to the concept of pain, which highlights the main presuppositions that underlie pain research undertaken both in the natural and in the sociohistorical sciences. My argument is composed of four steps: (1) only if pain is a stratified experience can it become a legitimate theme in both natural and sociohistorical sciences; (2) the phenomenological method is supremely well suited to disclose the different strata of pain experience; (3) the phenomenological account offered here identifies three fundamental levels that make up the texture of pain experience: pain can be conceived as a prereflective experience, as an object of affective reflection, or as an object of cognitive reflection; and (4) such a stratified account clarifies how pain can be a subject matter in the natural and sociohistorical sciences. Arguably, the natural and sociohistorical sciences address pain at different levels of its manifestation. While the natural sc...

This is an earlier version of the paper that became a chapter in my book Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

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...