We all know what pains are, don’t we? We act as if we do; we tell other people that we are in pain and we accept others’ reports of pain…
Archive for 2020
How is Pain Social?
I study those who study pain. For most of the past decade, I have conducted an ethnographic study on the neuroscience of pain, conducting observations in neuroimaging pain labs and…
Intro to Pain
Pain’s inexpressibility has dominated its discourse as long as people have attempted to write about it — yet we continue to do so, robustly. While completing a book manuscript on the…
Free and Unfeeling?
Pain has an element of blank.— Emily Dickinson Much of my work in recent years has been to think through the relationship between my scoliosis-related disabilities and my writing practice,…
Free Trade Comedy: Slapstick Toggling in Global Supply Chains
We should note from the outset that slapstick is named not after the genre from which it originally derives but from that genre’s defining prop. Although most often associated with…
Gag Reflexes: Sex Doll Slapstick and Fran Ross’s Oreo
Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head….
Norman Mailer and “The Mary McCarthy Case” Revisited
The runaway success of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a novel about the lives of eight Vassar graduates during the 1930s, was one of the most sensational literary events of 1963….
Lamentation, Remembrance, the Body
Remembrance, as it works through the body, moves in shapes and sensations. Remembrance can be an ache, a tickle, a warmth, a cringe, a sigh; it can end up with…
The Border’s Bright Dead Things: On Ada Limón’s Embodied Poetics
Late in June 2019, like many others worldwide, I viewed, aghast, the photograph of the drowned bodies of 26-year-old Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria….
Black Latina Girlhood Poetics of the Body: Church, Sexuality and Dispossession
Like Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poetry novel The Poet X, I was always afraid of getting disciplina — of getting caught up and revealed as an imposter…