Everybody’s (Gender) Hurts: Gendered Experiences of Pain

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)

Organizer Name

Alicia Spencer-Hall

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. College London

Presider Name

Janine Larmon Peterson

Presider Affiliation

Marist College

Paper Title 1

"Siker ich": Narrative Dominance as Assault in Sir Degaré

Presenter 1 Name

Hannah M. Christensen

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Univ. of Chicago

Paper Title 2

Punishing Amazon Transgressions: Slander, Dismemberment, and Death in the Romans Antiques

Presenter 2 Name

Elizabeth S. Leet

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Washington Univ. in St. Louis

Paper Title 3

Human and Trans-human Experiences of Pain in the Late Middle Ages

Presenter 3 Name

Jonah Coman

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Univ. of St. Andrews

Start Date

13-5-2017 3:30 PM

Session Location

Schneider 1120

Description

Following Elaine Scarry’s (1985) seminal work The Body in Pain, researchers from various disciplines have productively studied pain as a physical phenomenon with wide-ranging emotional and socio-cultural effects (e.g. Boddice 2014; Cohen et al 2012; Davies 2014; Morris 1991; Moscoso 2012). Academics and scientist-clinicians have demonstrated that the experience of pain is highly gendered (see e.g. Bendelow 1993; Bernardes et al 2014; Hoffmann and Tarzian 2001). For example, the severity of women’s pain is often less readily accepted by medics. Women in pain are more likely to be dismissed as attention-seeking or suffering from psycho-somatic conditions than men. Painful conditions that affect many women, such as endometriosis, are woefully under-studied.

Medievalists have also analysed pain, including its’ gendered dimension, elucidating a specifically medieval construction of physical distress (see e.g. Cohen 1995, 2000, 2010; Easton 2002; Mills 2005; Mowbray, 2009). In particular, Caroline Walker Bynum’s ground-breaking feminist scholarship (see e.g. 1988, 1992) has shown the specific ways in which medieval holy women harnessed ascetic suffering as forms of empowering worship praxes.

This panel will examine the gendered experience of pain in the medieval period, engaging with, and moving beyond, the limited context of holy women established by Bynum. It will dissect the ways in which men and women experienced -- or were understood to experience -- pain differerently, to elucidate the wider framework of gender-specific suffering in the period. The subjective experiences of medieval men and women in pain will be unearthed, allowing their marginalised voices to add context and further urgency to contemporary debates about inadequate medical care for modern men and women in pain.

Relevant questions for this session include:

• How are the pains of “women’s complaints” -- including menstruation and childbirth -- depicted, and understood in the medieval era? Are other forms of physical discomfort coded as predominantly feminine - even if they have no direct biological link to womanhood? Are there similar “male” forms of pain?
• How are men and women socialised differently to understand, to contextualise, and ultimately to experience their pain? How do men and women express their pain? And share their pain with those around them? Are specific patterns of lexis, imagery, or metaphor routinely used by either men and women, or both?
• What differences can we observe between the ways in which men and women in pain are treated by medical practitioners, the religious community, and their families? What was the contemporary rationale for classifying and treating men and women’s pain differently? As a counterpoint: what similarities are there in the treatment of pain for men and women? Does the pain experience ever unite suffering men and women as a cohesive group, a group in which pain -- and not gender -- is the most important identity marker?

Alicia Spencer-Hall