In “Narrating Pain in Historical Medical Frameworks,” Whitney Arnold investigates how medical paradigms, personal experiences, and narrative conventions structured autobiographical accounts of pain in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain and France at a time when both the genre of autobiography and medical models were in transition. Through an interdisciplinary approach that places scientific and philosophical models of pain in dialogue with literary studies, this paper highlights the conceptual apparatuses authors used to examine sensory perceptions, and the interpretive and narrative strategies they employed to interpret and document personal experiences of pain.

In “The Work of Hurting: The Labor of Chronic Pain and The Diary as Cultural Archive in Diario del dolor (Diary of Pain) by María Luisa Puga” Antonia Puchulu-Cox proposes a reading of Puga’s Diario del dolor (2004) as an experiment in writing that denaturalizes medical and social assumptions of chronic pain in contemporary Mexico. Puga turns Dolor into an interlocutor and character, staging a dialogue that exposes how chronic illness reorganizes time, subjectivity, and social relations. Drawing on debates in disability studies and medical humanities, Puchulu-Cox shows how Puga’s text unsettles the patient–provider binary, foregrounds the labor of living with pain, and registers the institutional indifference of Mexico’s public health system. In doing so, Diario del dolor offers a counter-archive of pain that resists its privatization and pathologization, inviting us to understand pain not only as a bodily event but as a cultural, relational, and political experience.

Julia Wajdziak unpacks the multimodal work of Andrea Gibson in “Guiding the Spider: Queer Archives of Pain in Andrea Gibson’s Illness Writing.” The paper asks how Gibson’s cultural production translates experiences of chronic illness into shared knowledge and what forms of agency emerge from this articulation. Engaging with Susan Sontag’s warning that no collective “we” should be assumed when encountering another’s suffering, Wajdziak explores how Gibson’s work constructs audiences and solidarities around queer experiences of illness. In doing so, it frames poetry and digital media as methods for archiving pain beyond biomedical discourse. Gibson's multimedia project—including essays, poems, and videos published on their Substack Things That Don’t Suck and the documentary film Come See Me in The Good Light (dir. Ryan White)—functions as a cultural archive of chronic illness. Across these media, pain becomes what Boyer calls a “fluorescent feeling”: something that demands new aesthetic strategies in order to be expressed. Drawing on Anne Boyer’s claim that the supposed “incommunicability” of pain is a myth, Wajdziak argues that Gibson’s work demonstrates how poetic and digital forms make pain communicable through metaphor, performance, and community circulation.

This panel opens up literary, medical, and anthropological frameworks for understanding the cultural production of pain in three different languages and historical and geographical contexts. It incorporates a diversity of voices both in the literary authors it analyzes and in the range of speakers, who are based in two different countries and include both doctoral students and faculty. While the panel shows how depictions of pain vary across language, time, and place, it demonstrates that pain consistently evokes new aesthetic strategies in dialogue with emerging scientific and philosophical models of the body and new media forms. Each speaker will present for 15 minutes and the presider will speak for five to ten minutes to introduce the panel and speakers, leaving 20 to 25 minutes for discussion.