How to Do Things with Pain?

Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Suffering Art Gladly, 2013

I discuss the aesthetic power of painful art. I focus on artworks that occasion pain by “hitting too close to home,” i.e., by presenting narratives meant to be “about us.” I consider various reasons why such works may have aesthetic value for us, but I argue that the main reason has to do with the power of such works to transgress conversational boundaries. The discussion is meant as a contribution to the debate on the paradox of tragedy.

Somatosphere, 2019

Essay on writing experiments at the convergence of poetry and ethnography as a means to convey experiences of suffering: Recent ethnographies of suffering highlight innovative ways medical anthropologists embed themselves in their accounts of others’ suffering, as well as their misapprehensions about what occurs in this process of witnessing. Dwelling in these misapprehensions shows the obvious potency of medical anthropological research to existential questions of care. As a standardized genre, however, ethnography transports readers and listeners in certain directions of knowing through conventions of analytic voice and staging of researcher positionality. I consider how poetic form can enable ethnographers to resist these conventions and re-sound ones’ own and others’ experiences of suffering beyond a biomedical register. I draw on recent examples from my own work and as part of a lineage that calls for integration between medical anthropology and the medical humanities.

Irish Journal of Anthropology, 2019

Ethnographers aim to understand life as lived, as poetry aims to evoke it. As social (and specifically medical) anthropologists navigating cross-currents of disciplinary expectations, in this article we hold ethnography and poetry side-by-side. We ask what they share and where they diverge. Specifically, we explore how poetry and ethnography inhabit (and are inhabited by) the physical, psychological and social experiences of pain. We each share our experiences of writing poetry as practicing anthropologists, and consider the potential for active cross-pollinations of ethnographic and poetic practice as a route to understanding both the heights and depths of embodied human experience.

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.

2021

Seeing 8. The photograph as a mediating space in clinical and creative encounters 147 Deborah Padfield 9. How images change non-verbal interaction in chronic pain consultations 177 Amanda C de C Williams 10. Picturing pain 190 Suzannah Biernoff 11. Making charcoal for drawing 214 Onya McCausland 12. The art of pain and intersubjectivity in Frida Kahlo's self-portraits 219 Minae Inahara 13. The thing about pain: The remaking of illness narratives on social media 230 Elena Gonzalez-Polledo and Jen Tarr 14. Exhibiting pain: The role of online exhibitions in sharing creative expressions of chronic physical pain 244 Susanne Main Part III: Speaking 15. 'Me' and 'my pain': Neuralgia and a history of the language of suffering 255 Joanna Bourke 16. Language and images in pain consultations 269

Arts in Psychotherapy, 2011

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit:

Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, 2022

For a long time, scholars in the Humanities have been trying to move towards a boundary space that touches upon the medical and scientific disciplines. More than others, the topic of representation/visualisation, the relationship between ways of seeing, images, and the techniques to create them has emerged as a fertile and valuable ground for dialogue. This special issue of Cinema & Cie sets itself the ambitious goal of opening an interdisciplinary discussion reflecting on the images of illness, wound, pain, scar, and cure, which are shared today more than ever and go beyond the narrow medical field. In order to develop a new interdisciplinary methodology suitable for capturing the emotions, material dimensions, bodily practices, performative dynamics, and intersubjective systems that, as a whole, consolidate the mise en discourse of the body as an object of care, we have called upon the traditions of Trauma Studies, Medical Humanities and Visual Culture of science and medicine. In this perspective, images are not only the starting point for understanding knowledge production processes but also a valuable restorative tool for care and therapeutic practices.

The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 51 (4/2018): 13-23, 2018

Introductory essay to The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, special issue on 'The Affective Aesthetics of the Body in Pain', co-edited by Luz Mar González-Arias and Monika Glosowitz.

Shodh Sanchar Bulletin , 2020

Pain and misery is found universally, the intensity may differ; the methodology of infliction may vary and the victimsheterogeneous. But traumatic experiences disrupt all those who come in contact with it. This paper tries to understand the affect of the visual documentation of trauma in an attempt to give ‗others' a worldview of reality; the so-called ‗slice of life'. This paper attempts to critically analyze the impact of the photograph or images on all those engaged in the production and the consumption of the document. The concept of the ‗gaze' is crucial in understanding this process.

Sociologia & Antropologia

In this text I discuss my encounters with Veena Das’s ideas over the course of my own research on suffering and violence. I trace the paths that led to my investigation of the theme through the memories of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), highlighting the points where the author’s work resonated and made itself present. The reading of violence proposed by Das, which sees it not as merely destructive but also as a source of possibilities for reconstructing life after devastation, provided a way forward for my own inquiry that focuses not on the events of the dictatorship per se, but on the singularity of the experiences of suffering, apprehended in the forms of speaking expressed in the testimony of those who lived through these experiences or were affected by them.

2003

Art and Pain home current issue archives gallery contact Return to Contents Nescio, sed sentio et excrucior: the many faces of art and pain (1)

Humanities Research

The Changing Body: Concepts and Images of the Body in Western Art, 2004

In Barbara Kruger’s sophisticated juxtaposition of images and words emerges injured hands, broken hearts, terrified faces, bandaged heads, punished bodies, and birthing genitalia that poignantly associate with pain. And the text messages superimposed over the pictures deal with experiences and effects of pain: “There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.” Art historians have largely ignored the fact that the theme of pain, including physical torment and mental suffering, actually underlies Kruger’s work made between the late 1970s and the 1990s. This body of work throws into relief her interests in issues and representations of sexual politics, medical establishment, and media spectatorship over two decades. Her scenes of pain reveal a keen awareness of the problematics of spectacle of violence, horror, and “wound culture.” In this spectacle-crazed yet shock-proof time, she shuns away from lurid and gory scenes of pain but raises questions about the meanings of bodies in crisis with intelligence and acuity. We shall see in this essay it is in the imagery of pain that the dynamics between pictures and words produces a confluence of Kruger’s major concerns of social relations, body politics, and media culture. This interpretative strategy will hopefully more clearly reflect the persistent conflation of issues and interests evident in Kruger’s artistic practice, and avoid the common pigeonholing and categorization of gender, economic, political, and formalist readings that the artist has tried to dispel. I will first read the critique of medical treatment of pain in Kruger’s early photo-text work Hospital and then analyze her continued use of medical materials, responses to media culture and stereotypes, and inquiries into the borders of pain in the work of the 1980s. Finally I focus on the pain of childbirth and the theme of empathy featured in the installations and billboards of the early 1990s within a gradual culture-wide anesthesia.