“Chronic Pain and Illness: States of Privilege and Bodies of Abuse”

In her contribution to A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age, Theodora Danylevich explores the relationship between chronic conditions and the geopolitical, social and environmental factors of Modernity. Chronic pain and illness disrupt the “discourses of logic and rationality, cause and effect”, requiring a “reorientation of the ways in which we have been taught to make sense of — and conform to — the social, cultural, and material world we inhabit”. They also “present bodies and societies with a paradigmatically modern experience that is at the same time completely incommensurate with the normative time and space of the modern laboring and consuming subject”.