The (De)legitimation of Pain in Interpersonal Conflicts

• In Event: 30866 - Culture and Meaning in Health and Medicine

Abstract

Pain is a ubiquitous yet entirely individual experience. No one can truly understand another’s pain, and this leaves room for others’ skepticism and doubt, which in turn serve to socially construct pain as an illness experience. I explore the role of pain in social relationships and especially in interpersonal conflicts in order to understand how pain and illness are interpreted and (de)legitimized. Using text data from the “Am I the Asshole” subreddit, I take a mixed methods approach to text analysis, using an adapted version of computational grounded theory (Nelson 2020). Through computational and qualitative methods, I investigate narratives of interpersonal conflicts that involve pain in order to understand the role of pain in social relationships and how pain and pain behaviors are interpreted and understood by both the pain sufferer and others. In particular, I explore how structural and institutional inequalities, especially gender stereotypes and the sick role, are mobilized to (de)legitimize) and construct pain.

Author

• Terresa Ji Hyun Eun, Stanford University