Articulating Pain: Writing the Autoimmune Self

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Andrews, Alice. 2017. Articulating Pain: Writing the Autoimmune Self. In: EJ Gonzalez-Polledo and Jen Tarr, eds. Painscapes: Communicating Pain. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 83-105. ISBN 9781349952717 [Book Section]

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Official URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-34...

Abstract or Description

This chapter responds to the individualising of pain and suffering, the over-valuation of the cure, and the investment in a certain ableist future that is a growing feature of neoliberal societies. This response is enacted not through turning away from individual personal experience, but rather through a strategic use of the autobiographical as a practice that takes care of/in the risky opening of an individuated self. By attending to the experience of autoimmune disease and its painful effects, the autobiographical address articulates with multiplying relations: Derridean deconstructive autoimmunity, with systems theory’s autopoiesis, affect theorists’ analysis of disability and debility within the neoliberal present, with the situated knowledges, or ‘cripistemologies,’ of a painfully articulated, disjointed past, present, and future to come.

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Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95272-4_5