by Alyson Patsavas
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Cloth: 978-0-472-07841-7
Paper: 978-0-472-05841-9
eISBN: 978-0-472-90621-5 (OA)
Pain in Relation: On Causality, Chronicity, and (Crip) Evidence argues that the dominant stories circulating within contemporary US culture are marked by seemingly contradictory certainties: pain is at once subjective yet universal; that pain makes life unlivable and can be overcome with perseverance. These certainties graft onto pained people into impossible imperatives: the imperatives to live “despite” our pain and to defend the value of lives imagined to be compromised “because of” it. Alyson Patsavas outlines the harm these imperatives cause and draws on feminist, queer, and disability theory to offer alternative frameworks for making sense of and relating to pain.
The study fleshes out “crip autotheory” and experiments with evidencing practices, using anecdotes, journal entries, personal reflections, list-making, and photography to map “cripistemologies of pain,” or critical, disability-informed experiential ways of knowing pain. Equal parts cultural critique, intimate portrait of pained life, and commentary, Pain in Relation invites readers to challenge what they think they know about pain and explore new ways of relating to pain, pained life, and the futures we imagine for pained people.
Alyson Patsavas is Associate Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“Pain in Relation explores how US discourses of pain shape experiences for pained people. It ‘unmakes’ or de-naturalizes these discourses through exposing how ‘common-sense’ ideas about pain obscure the multiplicitous experiences of pain. Using a disability studies lens and an autotheoretical account of pain, Pain in Relation opens up new understandings of pain through intricately theorizing its material, affective, and discursive complexity.”
— Anastasia Todd, University of Kentucky“Pain in Relation moves into the center of a heartbreaking, noisy set of debates about pain. It begins with a long-standing problem: the very human, but harmful, desire to define pain in terms of simple causal or numeric relationships. Clearly analyzing the flaws in our current theories of pain, Pain in Relation also points a new way forward. This book is beautiful, powerful, and necessary.”
— Margaret Price, Ohio State University“Through meticulous research, insightful theorizing, and creative illumination of pain in relation, Alyson Patsavas opens the door to wholly new dimensions where pain is felt, lived, experienced, and expressed outside of mainstream culture’s relentless attempts to simplify and contain it. As a model of what autotheoretical inquiry can accomplish and a demonstration of how feminism and disability work together to improve cultural conversations about embodied experience, this book will be important to a lot of people.”
— Lisa Johnson, University of South Carolina UpstateLicense: CC BY-NC
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