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Desiring Pain, Desiring Distress: Meditations on Disabled Bodymind1

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Desiring Pain, Desiring Distress: Meditations on Disabled Bodymind1 Margaret Price This is an unpublished paper. Please contact Associate Professor me before citing or sharing it. Thank you. Department of English Spelman College Atlanta, Georgia US [email protected] http://margaretprice.wordpress.com Desiring Pain, Desiring Distress: Meditations on Disabled Bodymind1 “Much in the same way that instances of drag reveal the performativity of gender, disability reveals the fluidity and complexity of pain.” —Dominika Bednarska, “Reconsidering Pain: What Counterculture Has to Offer” [Thank the people who invited me and have been helping me. Encourage people to use the room in the way that is most accessible to them. DESCRIBE image on cover slide. ALSO NOTE that I will be talking about pain, and specifically mental pain, which might be triggering. I will be talking briefly about the issue of self-harm, and will also talk briefly about BDSM. Please feel invited to leave or otherwise take a break as needed.] For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about mental pain—my own, others’, and what “mental pain” might even mean. It has so many names: mental illness, mental distress, even mental wounding, a term usually applied to veterans of declared wars. It has diagnostic and colloquial names: obsession, depression, meltdown, breakdown, break. It lives metaphorically as darkness visible, a loud room, a black dog. We are surrounded by all the names for pain. Now, by designating some kinds of pain as “mental,” I am making an artificial distinction between body and mind. While I consider myself to be a bodymind—a term I’ve written about in more detail elsewhere (Price, Mad at School)—I still believe there is value in designating things that are “mental.” The reasons are political and cultural rather than essential. Robert McRuer has pointed out the danger of arguing that identities are socially constructed: once one accepts that premise, it’s all too easy to move on to the argument, “Well then, we’re all a little bit queer, aren’t we?” or “We’re all a little bit disabled.” In 1 My thanks to Shelley Tremain, Melanie Yergeau, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Hilary Selznick, Tobin Siebers, and Johnna Keller, ongoing readers of this unfolding meditation. Price / “Desiring Pain” / 2 response, McRuer argues for retaining the concepts of disabled and queer in what he calls “desirable moments” (157), those that unsettle both the asker of such questions and the identities themselves. In a similar vein, I argue that, because “the mental” is materially identified in everyday life, it deserves our attention—despite our understanding that everyone’s a little bit mental. The mental deserves our attention because people still say routinely that certain ideas are “crazy,” that some theories or writings seem “schizophrenic” in their lack of clarity or apparent cohesion. [SLIDE of Chronicle screen cap. DESCRIBE.] The mental deserves our attention because, despite the fact that—according to my best estimate—about 400,000 faculty members in the United States have received a mental-health diagnosis, the Chronicle of Higher Education still publishes words and phrases such as “nutter” and “psycho-killer.” [SLIDE of HuffPo screen cap. DESCRIBE.] And it deserves our attention because last fall, the Huffington Post distributed a photograph of a professor at Michigan State University who “stripped naked, ran naked through his classroom and screamed.” In short, I’m saying that because specific oppressions exist, this category exists. The mental. And as a category, the mental has an intriguing ability to bring together disability and queerness, perhaps in part because these two identities are so often suggested to exist “all in our minds.” I’ve been living with my own mental pain for a long, long time. It might date back to 1971 or ’72, which is, as near as I can estimate, the time at which my sexual abuse began. It might date more recently—perhaps to my friendless years in junior high, or perhaps to my early 20s, when I began seeking therapy in the understanding that the next suicide attempt probably would kill me. Perhaps, for a doctor, my history of mental distress would date to the time I began taking medications for my mind, about nine years ago. No matter how it is counted, I know this about my mental pain: I had to live with it for a long time before I could begin to try to describe it.2 And then my attempts to describe it went on for quite some time before I could find a way to say anything interesting about it. By “interesting,” I mean something that strangers to me—not my best friends, not my chosen family—might be able to make use of. In that effort, I have arrived at a central conviction, which has led to several questions, which have led in turn to an argument. First, the conviction. We need to think and talk more carefully about pain—not in order to overcome it, but in order to overcome the many oppressions that attempt to annihilate us for feeling pain. 2 With Bednarska, I am more interested in looking at how people in pain speak about that pain rather than assuming that pain is, in Elaine Scarry’s term, “unsharable,” an entity that “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it” (4). Price / “Desiring Pain” / 3 Starting from that conviction, these are the questions I’ve come to so far: [SLIDE with question #1] What is the nature of mental pain? Are there differences between mental pain, mental distress (Wilson & Beresford), anguish (Sartre), suffering, sensation (Bednarska), and strain? How are these states different from “ordinary,” that is, from “normal” kinds of pain—run-of-the-mill depression, everyday jitters? How do they differ between cultural contexts; for example, is there, as Terrie Williams suggests, a cultural form of “black pain,” related to what Joy Degruy Leary calls “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” and is there a “feminine mystique” that entails taking psychoactive “little helpers,” and how are these related to queer pain? Is queer pain itself a part of what Judith Jack Halberstam calls “the queer art of failure”? In sum, I’m wondering about the maps we shall draw of pain. If there are kinds of pain, how shall we map their differences, and most crucially, whose interests are served by the maps we draw? The feeling of joy in pain is only one example of how very complicated our maps will have to be in order to speak, as Tobin Siebers has suggested, not in fear of pain but “in the name of pain.” By “joy in pain” I do not mean “joy in spite of pain,” in some hackneyed story in which the protagonist “suffers from” a chronic illness and yet manages, against all odds, to perform some miraculous action such as swimming with a dolphin. I mean joy in pain. One example, which both Siebers and Dominika Bednarska have discussed, is that of BDSM. Pain in BDSM, as Bednarska deftly explains, is not something to be avoided, but rather is something that “satisfies desires and clearly involves intentionality” (2); moreover, it befuddles “ingrained expectations about the body, how it should or should not feel, and what it should allow or even enable us to do” (8). One person under the lash of a singletail, for example, will shout for the whipping to stop; another will call to his top to keep on and intensify the sensation; and it is not certain, except within the boundaries of a scene, whether either person actually wants to the sensation to continue; it is also not certain whether we could meaningfully call what this person is experiencing pain. Pain in such situations, from my point of view, becomes something so multifaceted it is no longer well served by a single word. Another example of joy in pain can be found in the experience of those who self-harm for emotional release. Cutting is one common behavior; another, less well known but also effective, is holding ice in one’s hand. Ice is in fact my own go-to remedy for the complete mental breaks I sometimes experience. These are breaks with reality so severe that I lose my sense of being a functioning adult, and am subsumed by the desire to create an intense physical sensation in my body, usually in the form of hitting my head against a wall or with some nearby object. As in an SM scene, the word pain in these situations is both all-consuming—it is the central and the most important thing I am feeling—and entirely inadequate—since at such times, I occupy a space in which ordinary metrics of pain make no sense. I think that most commentators on behaviors such as cutting miss this point. Halberstam, for example, describes cutting as an act of “dismantling” (139). In the extended analysis of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece,” while multi-layered and complex, Price / “Desiring Pain” / 4 seems to miss the possibility that cutting might be an act, not of “unbecoming” (140) or “unbeing” (145), but rather of re-becoming; that is, of coming back to sense and self after losing them involuntarily. This is why I hesitate to refer to behaviors such as cutting or head-banging as “self-harming.” They are self-harming only if you take a certain point of view—that is, a point of view outside the person actually performing the behavior—and, not incidentally, occupying the mind that has, for whatever reasons, requested or required the behavior. This is what I mean when I say we must draw our maps of pain, suffering, distress, etc.
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