Open AccessChronic Pain as Fluid, BDSM as Control
Author(s) -
Emma Sheppard
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
disability studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2159-8371
pISSN - 1041-5718
DOI - 10.18061/dsq.v39i2.6353
Subject(s) - normative , chronic pain , narrative , psychology , pain control , control (management) , medicine , psychiatry , political science , law , anesthesia , computer science , art , literature , artificial intelligence
The paper identifies how chronic pain is a disability and lays out the ways in which a cripistemology of chronic pain – and cripping chronic pain – is a productive exploration of pain. After exploring normative discourses of chronic pain through a crip lens, and identifying how pain is not meaningless, but instead imbued with multiple meanings, the paper presents some findings from a recent research project exploring the phenomenological experience of people living with chronic pain who engage in BDSM play. Two dual narratives are identified: pain as a contagious fluid, requiring control of pain and the emotional expression of pain, and the uses of BDSM in that control. The paper offers a crip reading of these non-normative experiences.