Alyson Patsavas

Clinical Assistant Professor Disability and Human Development UIC

Thinking Disability Through Pain: The Logic of Accounting and The Possibilities of Crip Counter-logics

2/16 Rosenwald Hall 329 12:00-1:30

My talk presents research from my book project, The Logic of Accounting: Pain, Promises, and Prescriptions, which critically examines the discursive construction of pain and pain relief as a distinct cultural, economic, and political “problem.” I first interrogate how contemporary U.S. cultural discourses frame pain as simultaneously a unique medical condition (versus a symptom), a national crisis (first of pain and then of pain relief), and a personal imperative of self-governance and self-management (to overcoming the problem of pain). I detail the specific role that economic rationality plays in structuring these broader understandings of pain as costly—to the nation, community, family, and the self—which in turn frames both affective and material responses to pain. In doing so, I map out what I call a “logic of accounting for pain” as a means of connecting seemingly disparate discourses to the underlying rationality that conditions how we think and ultimately feel pain. Against this backdrop, I outline feminist, crip and queer interventions into this logic. In doing so, I use pain as a theoretical leverage point to further what I have called “cripistemologies of pain” or specific epistemologies built from the action and analysis embedded within critical disability perspectives and commitments to ask: what does it mean to think disability through pain?

Bio: Alyson Patsavas is a Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor in the department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her scholarship focuses on the cultural politics of pain, the cultural politics of health and illness, the intersections of queer theory and disability studies, and representations of disability in film, television, and popular culture. Her work appears in Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television, The Feminist Wire, Somatechnics, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Patsavas is also a writer and producer on the forthcoming documentary film Code of the Freaks that examines crip culture’s response to Hollywood representations of disability.