Chronic Pain as Fluid, BDSM as Control

Abstract

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.