Invited Work

Writing is a collaborative process, and pain is an affect produced and mobilized intersubjectively. To avoid crystallizing constructions of pain, culture, and biomedicine to the self, I invited friends with relevant experiences — of me, of pain, of biomedicine, of artistic expression — to contribute to this project.¹

Mary Krienke wrote a brief reflection that incorporates a WhatsApp post shared with me, Anji, and Sara, titled "There are no words for this but here are mine." Sara Fuller contributed a photo essay titled "Around pain." Jeyandini Fernando wrote a narrative piece titled "The nature of the beast." And Anji Manivannan knitted a soft sculpture of a rectum, colon, and appendix, titled "Knitted guts."

There is a crip commons to be found around collaborative artwork, performance, storytelling, handcrafting. Well-known activists or collectives double as writers, performance artists, visual artists, designers. The contributions here are a microcosm of a misabled/interabled collective, illustrating a range of co-constitutive personal and collective experiences and understandings of pain that exert an influence on how I interpret my pain, and how I adapt my pain expressions to be cunningly misinterpreted in the clinic and the academy.

¹ A dissertation is meant to be single-authored; these contributions are supplements to the text and would appear in the appendix in a traditionally formatted document. If your degree or awards requirements specify no second authors, you may skip this padalam with impunity.

However, consider the double entendre before you depart: overstuff any appendix, and its borders will bleed. ↩