ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses women’s pain, particularly biological and physiological pain specific to the female body, such as puberty pain, menopausal pain and painful intercourse. Scholarship on the connection between gender and pain has demonstrated the intricate relations between women’s physical pain and their gender identity. For Niuniu, pain is a medium that connects her self with her surroundings, defining her existence. The corporeal pain however drags her mind back into her body, and to the first-person narrative, with a ‘new birth’ suggesting the existence of a self that is different from before. By experiencing and witnessing various kinds of gendered physical pain, Niuniu’s self goes through cycles of deconstruction, re-construction, dissection and collage.
