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Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

Pain Studies

* All pain is simple. And all pain is complex. You’re in it and you want to get out. How can the ocean be not beautiful? The ocean is not…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

The Job Market is Killing Me

It was midnight on Halloween. The muffled chants of frat boys clued me in to the scene outside. I shut my computer, my second big round of job market deadlines…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

Puzzles with Pain Reports

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…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

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…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

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…

Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

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,…

Issue 4: Political Reaction and the Politics of Slapstick, Peer Reviewed Articles

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…

Issue 4: Political Reaction and the Politics of Slapstick, Peer Reviewed Articles

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….

Issue 4: Political Reaction and the Politics of Slapstick, Peer Reviewed Articles

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….

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

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…