ABSTRACT
Informed by direct personal experiences and research interests, this chapter examines depictions of social encounters in four chronic pain comics (Chronic Pain is a Party; Doodle Thru; My Chronic Pain Diary; and Hope, Heal, Cook). Produced by people who experience chronic pain, these first-person accounts of mundane interactions both deploy and subvert tropes. Illustrations of social encounters are especially potent contexts for identifying metanarratives because they reveal the incongruity between expectations of normalcy and impairment. The comics function as sites of resistance in which the metanarrative of the meaning of life with chronic pain is contested.
