Reading with the Body: Embodied Encounters with the Chronic Pain Narrative

This thesis examines how eight contemporary female authors confront chronic pain’s unique challenges to written representation. Starting with the claim that expressing chronic pain is more complex than acute pain, but nonetheless possible, I engage with life writing on chronic pain by Eula Biss, Sonya Huber, Hilary Mantel, Abby Norman, Sinéad Gleeson, Anne Boyer, Porochista Khakpour, and Susan Greenhalgh. My analysis is organised around four moments ubiquitous to chronic pain narratives: assessment, invalidation, treatment, and diagnosis.
Whilst I maintain that chronic pain challenges self-expression, I examine the authors’ creative, evocative approaches to chronic pain’s narrativisation, and I draw on embodied responses to their texts, including the intensification of my own pain. I expand understandings of pain’s relationship to language, unearthing unexpected connections between the narratives including recurrent ghost metaphors, evocative temporal instabilities, narrative ruptures, and the significance of geographical dislocation. Arguing for the importance of engaging with accounts which underscore chronic pain’s negativity and multiplicity, this thesis also reads the authors’ personal, evocative accounts dialogically, holding space for my analysis of the narratives to unfold alongside readings of biomedical literature and cripistemological insights.
My cripistemological understandings, from chronic pain, illness, and neurodiversity, are central to my analysis, and as such I elucidate the intersections of reading and embodiment, leaning into sensation, affects, misreadings, dissociation, and rest breaks throughout. In doing so, I performatively highlight the assumptions which underlie academic work, productively defamiliarising the narratives’ subject matter and troubling expectations of coherence. I demonstrate that being attuned to embodiment whilst reading offers productively disruptive, generative insights into written representations of chronic pain. Fundamentally, this thesis asserts the importance of reading women’s chronic pain narratives, arguing that staying with their plurality and linguistic instability offers evocative, nuanced ways of understanding what it means to read, write, and know chronic pain.