ABSTRACT
The preference for narrative within disability studies itself – perhaps more broadly, the privilege of prose over poetry as a substrate for scholarly analysis – is one of the reasons why pain lacks a poetics within the field. In addition to the field’s preference for narrative, another reason to account for the lack of disability pain poetics might be what Mark Osteen has identified as the social model’s “neo-Cartesian duality – its separation of body from mind, of impairment from disability” leading to inadequate theorizations of pain as an experience. A hierarchy is thus established in a formative anthology, though it is a hierarchy shared in disability studies scholarship too. The poem remains in the zone of damage metaphor but the representational strategy is alternative in that the wound is foregrounded in a framework of healing. Trying to determine the bodily location of pain through listening to a patient history is, in medical sense, the point of taking a history.
