"Just as experiencing pain is a signifier of humanity - of being alive - being able to rationalize and describe pain is a signifier of being a proper human - in that the normal, proper human has the language skills and the knowledge of appropriate words to communicate a description of their experience, even if it can only be done once the urgency of acute pain has passed. The normal human can bring their experience within language through metaphor and simile, even if that language is cliched and restricted.The expectation of, and ability to, put pain into language, to contextualize pain, to make it accessible to others, creates the normative structure whereby pain is further restricted to the animal and the abnormal; pain is ontologically negative. This understanding of humanity is at once normative and ableist."
"The situations in which pain is regarded as normal - even expected - are highly gendered and racialized, with women's pain being regarded differently to men's, even as the pain of women of color is regarded differently to the pain of white women."
"As Leder (1990) observes, this contributes to the conception of the body as machinic, with fixable, replaceable parts, where "the patient's own experience and subjective voice becomes inessential to the medical encounter."
"The positioning of the doctor as knowing, and the patient as unknowing, is supported by the process of becoming a subject of the medical gaze, where, far "from being a locus of self, patient's bodies are transformed into objects of scrutiny, organs in a sack of flesh." (Young, 1997: 11-12)..... In Jain's experience, the patient becomes an object that is incapable of knowledge, which only the medical gaze - properly trained and properly objective - can truly understand."
"In medicine, seeking to understand pain is only useful insofar as a cause is sought, and pain is only useful for indicating that something else is wrong."
"...there tends to be the assumption that the symptoms themselves do not need treating, only the underlying disease - and therefore if the symptoms do not lead to a clearly identifiable disease with a straightforward treatment, those symptoms can go untreated."
"As Wendall (1996) observes, somewhat wryly, doctors and medics don't like to admit when they don't know something - as a result of what she aptly describes as a hero complex - and therefore a person presenting with chronic pain (or other symptoms) that cannot be explained or cured are a problem, presenting as they do a challenge to the omniscience of the medical institution - which can result in dismissal of their pain, or active negativity or abandonment when doctors cannot "fix" a person."
"...those who regard pain as other than wholly intolerable are regarded as perverse or, more commonly, assumed to be lying about being in pain. The assumption that being in pain is intolerable, and reduces the person in pain down to an inhuman, animalistic, sufferer means that when people in pain present as anything other than inhuman, they are disbelieved, even though presenting as inhuman means they are stigmatized and made abject."
"The assumption of devastation, in addition, increases this sense of delegitimization; in not being wholly and continually devastated by pain - in not fitting the discursive expectation - we are assumed to not be in pain."
"The body in pain is not a docile body, but at least it does not disturb others, unless the body speaks and the experience of pain is expressed; because the body-not-in-pain is so normal, so invisible, bodies are assumed to be bodies-not-in-pain until they are revealed as otherwise, especially when those bodies have no other outward signifiers of disability."
"The medical model defines disability in terms of lack, and when it comes to sex and sexuality, there is an assumption of abnormality and problems - either disabled people have problems with their sex lives, or their sex lives and sexualities are problems in themselves. Thus, disabled people's sexuality is always abnormal."
"Cultivating the (eroticised) pain in the S/M practices (both public and private), becomes not a matter of simple domination or control of the pain, but a much more complex strategy of transforming and integrating the pain..." (Kolarova 2010: 49)"
"Pain and disability push Julie to become a misfit, a mismatch between "the co-constituting relationship between flesh and environment, but it also gives her the time and space to become, if not comfortable, then accepting."
"The queering/cripping of pain - of making pain work for and with onself - is a queering/cripping of the performance of being abjected, it is embracing abjection, embracing a queer and crip selfhood."
"embracing abjection does not mean performing abjection for the non-disabled, but accepting that they are already, and always, abject under the ableist gaze - and thus they can embrace disability and make it work for them, accept its limitations and discomforts and leaks as a part of their self."
"It is impossible to be in chronic pain and also to maintain a state of constant distress; the reliably unreliable body cannot be forever shut off from the world."
"When it comes to kink, the pain that results from play is reliable - it occurs in expected ways, in that it follows after activities that players know will cause pain, while chronic pain can spike after activities that are not associated with pain, and even after activities that have been performed without pain on previous occasions. In addition, the pain is likely to last for an expected amount of time - as acute pain, it contains the expectation that it will end. Thus, in playing with pain, participants are further adjusting to their reliably unreliable bodies, by re-establishing the reliability of non-chronic pain and re-confirming the unreliability of chronic pain, its abnormality. Kink pain in crip time is thus a part of their becoming disabled, their living with chronic pain."
"For all participants, kink was not only pleasurable, but produced a temporary relief from pain, in that they felt less pain, the quality of their pain changed, or they were focused elsewhere."
"there is no inherent joy in being normal, while the abnormal can be (or can be made to be) freeing and joyous. This joy in rejecting a normative pace of life (even if the rejection is the consequence of a loss of capacity) demonstrates the joy that can be found in living crip, in crip ways of moving through time."
"The admission of pain and fatigue is a reminder that they are abnormal, forcing the listener to face not just the pain of the speaker, but also the possibility of their own pain."
"Thus, stigmatized bodyminds are horrifying and repulsive becuase they act as reminders of the fragility of normality - of how close the normal human is to being abnormal, or to being lesser." (Williams, Bendelow 1998)
"the normal bodymind is one that has all the expected parts in working order, that speaks at the right time and volume, and moves in expected ways - that is not just whole but civilized in their wholeness, to perform abled-bodymindedness and demonstrate that one is not the abject."
"Importance is therefore placed on passing as normal, as non-disabled - as properly rehabilitated and not at fault - precisely because "passing is not just about the impaired person hiding their impairment or morphing their disability... [it] is about keeping the colonizer happy by not disturbing the peace, containing the matter that is potentially out of place" (Kumari Campbell, 2009b: 44). However as Tyler (2013) observes, national abjects remain at the center of public life even when they attempt to pass as normal, because they must be seen in order to be controlled; the thread of abjection is no threat without the visible abject. They are what Braidotti terms "disposable" bodies, who "experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction" (2011:6)"
"normality is both compulsory and an idealistic conception; we can never achieve perfect normality, because it constantly shifts beyond reach of the individual; we exist in a state of anxiety over our own lack of normality."
"Despite this need to remake the self with pain, balancing pain in functioning is not wholly sustainable; pain must be given into. BDSM provides a space for giving into pain."
"It is this notion of control, control of the body and control of the pain that has been particularly notable in my interviews, with participants seeking to find ways to not just regain a sense of control, but to regain their sense of self through exercising control over how they live with their pain."
"Self-awareness is in itself painful, because it requires being aware of the pain; there is a tension for all participants between enough self-awareness to engage with the world and the self, and experiencing pain so much that it becomes overwhelming. Thus, control of awareness becomes necessary."
"Kink is both a space to forgo control, and to express pain, but also served as a space in which to relieve the social pressure to contain responses to pain ..... Julie used kink to create a space where she felt it was safe to engage with her body - where she could allow herself to fully experience her chronic pain, which she otherwise pushed to the back of her mind."
"The idea of making her pain work for her - controlling pain and how it is experienced, rather than pain dominating her actions - is an important part of Catherine's chosen way of controlling pain."
"Charlie identified flogging and needleplay in particular as having an effect on pain sensation. They explained that this meant having pain caused in a particular area (away from the original injury site) as part of play, which in turn helped to full the sharper sensation they feel due to nerve damage around the injury site."
"For other participants, kink pain could overlay - not quite replace - chronic pain; in its urgency and acute sensation, it pulled away from chronic pain. Acute pain in a controlled situation allowed for a control of pain, again welcoming in sensation, reshaping the context."
"Several of the participants felt that being disabled made it easier for them to engage in non-normative sexual practices... because they are already cast as abnormal, and they have no desire to become normal, to be rehabilitated. ... Kink exposes being normal as not just impossible, but also unwanted - and for participants, embracing abnormality is not just possible, but necessary."
"Through engaging in kink, the participants are engaging in a process of making pain to witness, of making pain visible through participating in acts that are deliberately painful - in contrast to their chronic pain, which has no witness. Making pain is an act of meaningful communication (Price 2015), but in making pain to be witnessed, to be seen and heard by another, they are drawing the witness into their pain."