ABSTRACT
To begin, a metaphor: Just as people make love, they also make pain. Lovemaking involves, especially in its older, more circumspect usage, practices and institutions that circumscribe it. The making of love is a natural and cultivated kind of thing. Similarly with pain: Even if the fall into pain is more literal in one sense than the fall into love, the fall still occurs in a social order that has ready-made ways of constructing it. Pain, in its expression, alleviation, and suffering, is a performance that is as personal as cultural, as mental as physical, just as the making of love. We also “do” pain, as Joanna Bourke (2014) has aptly put it. To avoid the ambiguities of make/do, we shall use the more neutral term “construct” – hence the name of this book. Imagine pain to be a kind of building: Natural material, such as wood, is transformed by human knowledge and activity, and a place for inhabitation results. The difference is that few desire to inhabit the house of pain.
