ABSTRACT
Through this book, I have made a few big claims. Firstly: ableism and compulsory ableness structure and constrain how we understand pain within and outside of medicine; there is a distinction between pain and long-term chronic pain (as a disability) which is missing. In effect, ableist discourse expects all pain to be the same – in particular, that pain is negative, unwanted, and ontologically impossible in the long-term. A critical crip theory approach illuminates the discourses at work here; the cripistemologies of people living with chronic pain which emerged in my participants’ narratives demonstrated particular crip knowledge/understanding of what it is to live with chronic pain. In particular, we see that living with chronic pain – and in particular how that is shaped through the demands of normative expectations of everyday life – produces particular ways of living in and living through crip time.
