Question for Week 4: Pain and Disability

“To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 18

Please write a response about this quotation from Elaine Scarry’s book (which we’re not reading). How does it describe a central tension in most of what you’ve read this week?

We’ll also be talking about living with disability, which may or may not fit in with discussions of pain. You don’t need to include the articles that don’t fit this prompt in your answer (though you should still read them!) 🙂

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Elizabeth Reis

Elizabeth Reis recently joined the Macaulay Honors College at The City University of New York. Before that she was Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex and Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. She is also the editor of American Sexual Histories: A Social and Cultural History Reader.