ABSTRACT
Tobin Siebers wrote in 2008 that “the greatest stake in disability studies at the present moment is to fi nd ways to represent pain and to resist models of the body that blunt the political effectiveness of these representations” (61). Nowhere is this burden more uniformly clear than in our treatment of young people living with disability or disease. Our insistence that they remain manageable and undemanding has resulted in a deep ideological refusal to recognize pediatric pain as an imperative call for relief. Though pain relief has become globally recognized as a basic human right (Janeti and Liebeskind 1994, Cousins et al. 2004, Brennan et al. 2007, Gwyther et al. 2009, Macpherson 2009, Dahler 2010)—and, incidentally, Michael J. Cousins even includes treatment of dysfunctional pain like migraine explicitly in the consideration of as such a fundamental right (2000)—this right is not consistently extended to include children in practice.
