{"id":171,"date":"2021-08-17T17:57:33","date_gmt":"2021-08-17T21:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/?p=171"},"modified":"2021-09-01T10:09:31","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T14:09:31","slug":"bailey-flynn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/2021\/08\/17\/bailey-flynn\/","title":{"rendered":"Bailey Flynn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bailey Flynn<\/b> is a PhD candidate based in the Department of Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University. She is a researcher, writer, and community advocate, working with organizations including Resilience (formerly Rape Victim Advocates) and the Chicago Torture Justice Center. Her current research focuses on the articulation of physical pain as a site of identity negotiation. She is also a 2020-2021 recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for her previous teaching experience at the university.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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Pain in Translation:\u00a0Reclaiming the Illegible in US Form I-589<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Introduction<\/b><\/p>\n

Two years ago, I found myself in an emergency room because of abdominal pain. In the always-crowded ER, the mission for the overworked staff of nurses and doctors hung clearly in the air: treating true emergencies. If you arrived alert and responsive but with some kind of inconvenient hurt, you were shunted along the other, non-emergency path. This makes sense. There are more patients than doctors in most emergency rooms at any one time, and to ethically manage those numbers, some kind of prioritization system is required. Within the non-emergency track, this triage gets more complex. How long have you been waiting? Where does it hurt? How troubling is your pain?<\/span><\/p>\n

This was the system I found myself in while I waited for a doctor to come through my half-curtained hospital bed cubicle and determine what was causing my abdominal pain. At one point a medical student came in to take my vitals and attach a blood pressure cuff. She asked me, \u201cWhere would you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?\u201d I don\u2019t remember my answer, but it was enough for me to receive 50 micrograms of fentanyl, a painkiller fifty times stronger than heroin and one hundred times stronger than morphine. [1]<\/span><\/p>\n

This example highlights the everyday salience of my object of phenomenological study in this paper: physical pain. I am partial to Sara Ahmed\u2019s definition of phenomenology:<\/span><\/p>\n

I start here in part because phenomenology makes orientation central in the very argument that consciousness is always directed toward objects and hence is always worldly, situated and embodied \u2026 phenomenology emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready to hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds. [2]<\/span><\/p>\n

The ER anecdote might prompt any number of questions when placed alongside Ahmed\u2019s definition. How did my appearance as a young, White woman shape the way the medical student saw me (i.e. as a subject deserving of fentanyl, one of the most addictive synthetic opioids on the market)? The over-prescription aligns with quantitative evidence that White patients are 22% more likely to receive pain medication than comparable Black patients.<\/span> [3] On the other hand, the encounter also complicates literature on gender bias, which has demonstrated that women are less likely to be prescribed painkillers after, for instance, serious and painful surgery when compared to similar male patients.<\/span> [4] Insights like these gained from quantitative analysis are thought-provoking, but as their application in this case shows, they leave unclear how bodies actually act out these biases in space in contradictory and context-specific ways. Was there a way that I embodied \u201cfeminine body comportment and style of movement\u201d that affected how the medical student reacted to me?<\/span>\u2060<\/span> [5]<\/span><\/p>\n

This kind of question can be answered by introducing critical phenomenology to the scene. Doing so offers the researcher a method for being reflexive about habitual ways of moving in the world to understand the implicit assertions behind them about who gets to exist in the commons and how.<\/span> [6] In other words, using phenomenology in this way can allow one to make strange the habitual ways of being a body among other bodies in the world, allowing the distance required to critically analyze those modes of feeling, sensing, behaving. For many individuals, though, that distance is already keenly felt. Take the question from the medical student: Where would you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten? For marginalized subjects, this question may be one explicit manifestation of a wider, systemic demand. It can point us to the structuring of marginalized lifeworlds around orientations, nearnesses, and habits of the oppressor in order to make it into the inner circle, or at least receive some of the benefits held therein\u2014in this case, life-saving healthcare. How is the embodied experience of the marginalized also defined by a demand to transfigure bodily pain into legible forms that can cross a distance of oppressive apathy? And how can critical phenomenology help us to answer that question?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I argue that the transfiguration of physical pain into legally, socially, and politically legible formats (such as testimony or asylum documentation) is one of the defining burdens placed on marginalized bodies. While I believe that pain is deeply entangled on all levels of perception\u2014from social pain to bodily pain to emotional pain\u2014I will, for the purposes of this essay, confine myself to the physical. The Othered body\u2014often racially Othered, but sometimes also along lines of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and multiple other differences\u2014must not only experience hurt inflicted upon them, but then speak about it in the right words in order to be heard. Furthermore, I argue that there is something lost in the interim of this colonial translation\u2014that despite the efforts to make one\u2019s embodied experience legible, verisimilitude is always partial.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have two intentions in writing this essay. First, I contribute to the tradition of American Studies literature which seeks justice through a description of the ordinary, compromised agency of those living in and under power. I am not trying to make an essentialist argument; no identity group can be characterized as responding to normative orientational constraints as one block, angling for legibility. Many brave persons spend their political and intellectual lives refusing such schemes of legibility and imagining new worlds. Still, to quote Saidiya Hartman, \u201cin the meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet,\u201d between the orientations of power being seen and disrupted, it is also important to address those who do labor under conditions of strained legibility, those just trying to make-do. [7]<\/span>\u00a0Second, I suspect that studying this phenomenological problem can also get at a deeper ontological problem that impacts those belonging to any number of distinct histories of oppression: Pain cannot adequately be proven \u201creal\u201d as a self-evident fact. It can never pass beyond the body and consciousness of the one who claims it. Finding a way to compensate for this impossibility of perfect pain communication could offer marginalized folks in America new tools to work around the double translational gap of being in pain while Othered. This is a project, I hope, with potential applications as diverse as the group of persons who are filling out the immigration paperwork that will be the subject of this paper. As Mariana Ortega reminds, \u201cthe <\/span>our <\/span><\/i>of our dead is more expansive than we usually think.\u201d [8]<\/span><\/p>\n

Institutionalized attempts at compensation for pain\u2019s inarticulation already exist, but they seem to fail in some crucial and fundamental way.<\/span>\u2060<\/span> [9] This leads me to the selection of my case study, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice Form I-589, \u201cApplication for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal.\u201d In the following pages, I perform a rhetorical analysis on three open-ended questions contained in Part B of the document. These questions are geared towards assessing the character, emotional state, and traumatic history of the applicant. As I examine these questions, I am holding an equivalency between the successful articulation of pain or threatened pain and the likelihood of a successfully approved asylum request. Because the form is available to refugees arriving at a U.S. port of entry from any country, I am not performing an analysis of how these questions hail a singular particular identity. Considering the current U.S. border crisis and extreme anti-Latinx rhetoric of the 45<\/span>th<\/span> United States President, a study of how asylum discourse situates Latinx folks in particular is a worthwhile future project. For now, I will refer to a more general distinction the form presupposes between American bodies, coded as White, and non-American refugee bodies, coded as Black, Brown, or otherwise racially Other. I will thus build my argument about pain and the asylum process with these questions as a framework and conclude with thoughts on the broader place of phenomenology in American studies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

[Phenomenology of Other Pains, or] 3A) Have you or your family members ever belonged to or been associated with any organizations or groups in your home country, such as, but not limited to, a political party, student group, labor union, religious organization, military or paramilitary group, civil patrol, guerrilla organization, ethnic group, human rights group, or the press or media? <\/b>[10]<\/p>\n

The illegibility of the non-American refugee\u2019s pain under normative American eyes can be seen in the way Question 3A seems to grasp desperately for some kind of familiar language by which to recognize the applicant, who is otherwise nothing but a name and a painful story. The question is more a list of acceptable and recognized vocabulary than statement. The undercurrent of it might be: <\/span>Put this in terms I can understand, <\/span><\/i>or, <\/span>Start with facts\u2014who, where, when? <\/span><\/i>At first glance, it suggests a genuine attempt to figure the applicant as a person, one with attachments and networks of belonging, imbricated in their local social structure in any number of ways. But some of the \u201cgroups\u201d hailed raise flags that this is a more complicated and pointed fact-finding mission, including \u201cparamilitary group\u201d and \u201cguerrilla organization.\u201d We can presume that admitting one\u2019s belonging to a guerrilla group alleged to have enacted a bloody and inhumane coup, for instance, would, at the very least, present an obstacle to the application being approved. Phenomenologically speaking, answering in a way fitting an American definition of ideal citizenship\u2014(perhaps: <\/span>yes, I go to church, yes I am registered to a political party, but not a radical one<\/span><\/i>)\u2014brings the applicant nearer to the reviewer, makes them recognizable. Answering in a way not fitting this definition of citizenship\u2014admitting, for instance, belonging to the aforementioned hypothetical guerrilla group\u2014draws the applicant farther away from the reviewer, their violence characterized as un-American. This structure of perception could be called racial bestialization. It perceives the non-white person as inherently a non-human entity, one made of \u201cflesh\u201d rather than \u201cbody.\u201d<\/span> [11] Such BIPOC persons seen as \u201cenfleshed\u201d are thus interpreted by a White colonial gaze as liable to act on their base animal instincts; under a rubric of anti-Blackness and White supremacy, the racialized Other is deemed sub-human, and thus ruthless and violent or lacking in true conscience. This historical structure of vision is what Spillers touched on when she wrote, \u201c\u2018Slave\u2019 appears in the same context with beasts of burden, <\/span>all <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>any <\/span><\/i>animal(s), various livestock, and a virtually endless profusion of domestic content from the culinary item to the book.\u201d [12]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then again, the rhetorical structure of this question does not seem to call for a simple, \u201cno,\u201d either. \u201cHave you or your family members ever belonged to or been associated with any organizations or groups in your home country, such as, but not limited to\u2014\u201d is a phrase that suggests no answer could be too minor or mundane. To answer, \u201cno,\u201d and leave it at that, might raise eyebrows. Your children have never been part of the chess club at school? In a country in the midst of a politically divisive civil war, you have absolutely no political affiliation? You do not consider yourself as belonging to any one ethnicity? What are you trying to hide? This refusal to become legible, to play by the vocabulary offered, threatens to turn the applicant into a spectacle. If the applicant cannot present themselves in words legible as \u201cvictim,\u201d and cannot be dehumanized as subhuman\u2014in other words, if they answer \u201cno\u201d and leave it at that\u2014they risk being Othered as \u201cthe exhibited body,\u201d a term Harvey Young uses to describe black bodies kept at a distance by being put on display as abnormal, mysterious, or exceptional.<\/span> [13] Examples include the captives of Joseph T. Zealy\u2019s slave daguerreotypes, Saartjie Baartman, (the first \u201cHottentot Venus\u201d), and Muhammad Ali. This normative way of seeing keeps the applicant at arm\u2019s length as a marvel rather than a human being, an Other who does not belong.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear, then, that answering Question 3A in a way that would get an applicant one step closer to asylum-status requires a balancing act. The framework of I-589 leaves the applicant at a precarious crossroads of perception, where their fate may be determined by the evaluation of their character as debased, alien, or dignified in victimhood. The applicant cannot easily admit they belong to groups considered dangerous, corrupt, or morally wrong. The applicant also isn\u2019t urged to belong to nothing; it raises a long series of additional doubts and leaves their character indistinguishable among a vast pool of other applicants. Answering in a way that falls into one of these two camps opens up one\u2019s pain to interpretation as less legible rather than more. The immediacy of the applicant\u2019s painful persecution is flattened and pushed beyond the reach of the reviewer\u2019s perception as dominant stereotypes and pre-established ways of seeing obscure the path. This is the problem of Othered pain\u2019s illegibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

[Speaking the Language of Pain, or] 4) Are you afraid of being subjected to torture in your home country or any other country to which you may be returned?\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The phrasing of Form I-589’s questions is full of rhetorical hints which asylum applicants might seize upon to help them formulate answers. I have already touched on one manifestation of this translation work; in order to ensure their case for asylum is legible as an account of pain requiring intervention, applicants may take up the literal vocabulary that the form demands (i.e. reconfiguring their understanding of their own complex civic identity into a narrower box of political affiliation). This is the most apparent and surface-level kind of legibility work\u2014it involves translating local jargon and understandings into the terms of the American government. But there are other, more elusive kinds of translation required of the applicant as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

In question four of I-589, two other kinds of necessary translation are suggested, one by the use of \u201cafraid,\u201d and one by \u201creturned.\u201d To start with, what does fear have to do with pain? How does the former prove the existence of the latter? In their work on French asylum politics, Didier Fassin and Estelle d\u2019Halluin argue that even as the legitimacy and social acceptance of \u201crefugee\u201d as a category crumbled at the end of the 20<\/span>th<\/span> century, the deference to affective damage remained: \u201cFor at the same time as the generous idea of asylum lost its social recognition, trauma conquered it. Refugees thus slid from one to the other.\u201d<\/span> [14] It is this clinical and highly affective branch of pain\u2014trauma\u2014that is most useful in bureaucratically establishing the legitimacy of an asylum application. Interestingly, Fassin and d\u2019Halluin also found that affective testimonies of trauma by psychologists legitimized an applicant\u2019s experience of embodied pain even more than scars of physical torture: \u201cPsychic trauma, recently canonized, has become a plus-value in which physical traces of violence are absent. Whereas the detailed description of bodily scars certifies but impoverishes, the psychic symptoms of suffering supposedly reveal the \u2018truth\u2019 of experience. In the first case, violence is superficially inscribed. In the second, it is deeply embodied.\u201d [15]<\/span> The language of trauma thus acts as a kind of embodied translation between the speechless, \u201cimpoverished\u201d body and the bureaucratic language of asylum policy. The use of \u201cafraid\u201d in question 4 cues us and the applicant into this potential rhetorical tactic. Translating the pain one has experienced into legible format can be accomplished by laying bare the emotional, affective experience which proves that pain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The second term that stands out as a cue in question four is \u201creturned.\u201d This clues the applicant into the expectation for both kinds of legibility work already discussed: A use of the normative vocabulary of immigration and removal to describe their bid for safety, and an expectation of certain emotional performances (e.g. deference, humility, eagerness, gratitude) that suit the neat language of being \u201cadmitted\u201d or \u201creturned.\u201d It also points to a third kind of legibility work to be done by the applicant. If the threat of being \u201creturned\u201d to one\u2019s home country is the cue, the resulting tactic by an applicant to avoid this outcome might be to become (on paper) the \u201cdeserving immigrant,\u201d the person worthy of keeping.<\/span> [16] This kind of legibility work involves translating through languages of human dignity and morality. How can one translate their sense of essential worth as a human into a claim for their deservingness, their exceptional status, over other \u201cless desirable\u201d applicants? How can one become legible in a system of \u201cprecarity,\u201d a term Lauren Berlant has used to describe the economic and political position of the marginalized to be dependent upon institutions which are constantly unreliable and destabilizing for those who are deemed less-than?<\/span> [17] Andrea Pitts describes the immigration process as making one\u2019s self legible to the normative legal system as a precarious object <\/span>in order to maybe be deemed an exception to that precarity. <\/span><\/i>To gain safety from the immigration system, the applicant must first make themselves legible to its treatment, and take the risk of falling through its cracks in the hopes of being one of the lucky ones. Pitts takes up the case of Victoria Arellano as a case study. Arellano emigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico at seven years old and died at twenty-three while being denied medical treatment for an AIDS-related infection while detained in an immigrant detention center:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While local police did not interrogate [Victoria Arellano] about her citizenship status, the sentencing judge that she confronted once in custody concluded that \u2018the conviction of the offense for which [she was] charged [would] have the consequences of deportation, exclusion from admission to the United States, or denial of naturalization.\u2019 In fact, Arellano\u2019s detention and subsequent death at the hands of immigration and customs enforcement was made possible via a policy [of sanctuary] put into place decades earlier. [18]<\/span><\/p>\n

This passage clarifies a few of the navigational tools which marginalized and Othered applicants are asked to expertly wield in order to be legible as a legitimate refugee. In the previous section, I sketched out some of the ways that Othered pain may be deemed illegible. Here, I\u2019ve named just a few of the ways in which asylum applicants are expected to navigate around those structures\u2014those barriers\u2014and effectively translate their pain. As a final point, I want to reflect on why the distinction between these states\u2014legibility and illegibility\u2014matters, and why this labor may be exhausting for asylum applicants and other marginalized persons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

[The Gap Between, or] (1A) Have you, your family, or close friends or colleagues ever experienced harm or mistreatment or threats in the past by anyone?<\/b><\/p>\n

What is lost in the process of making pain readable? When the asylum applicant fills out I-589, potentially using some of the tools noted above, what is captured by their account and what is silenced? As I write this, I am dealing with a minor stomachache. If the medical student described in my introduction were here, I could tell her that the pain is a 2 out of 10. I can say that it feels like pressure, or like a sharp stab, or like my stomach is distended and taut as a drum, or whatever language is accessible to me. As I\u2019ve already argued in my phenomenological analysis, the words I use will make me accessible by some ways of seeing and obscured by others. Whether my language happens to fit into the world-making pattern of a given person determines whether or not my pain becomes within reach to them\u2014whether they will conceptualize or even empathize with it. Still, even if I provide a detailed ten-page description here of what my pain is like, and even if that understanding lands with a reader, their conception of my pain will still be one step removed from the actual experience of that pain. Pain is trapped within the body; it can be communicated, but only in part.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of Form I-589 and the American asylum-seeking process, this is a fundamental problem. On the one hand, it seems obvious that improving the asylum-seeking process would require expanding the scope of the questions asked in order to develop a fuller picture of the applicant. This could mean less translation and consolidation demanded in order to be legible within the sterile, 6-by-2-inch boxes provided for writing one\u2019s answer. It might mean opening up room for more partial or complicated histories, for a more complex understanding of what falls under the category of torture, or for providing reviewers a richer sense of local context. On the other hand, a system in which each asylum application is the length of a memoir would likely hurt more than it helped. Backups in processing might increase, leaving more persons in terrible suspense of deportation, or government employees might resign themselves to skimming each application, getting no greater depth of information than before. While we need strong calls for complete reimagining in immigrant and refugee policy, I repeat my earlier commitment: to address those who are and will continue to labor under current conditions of strained legibility, those just trying to make-do. Rather than imagining a future open borders United States, I want to offer three dimensions of pain presently flattened by the process of translating oneself in application documents, each of which could be better addressed. I hope that pointing out some specific resistances of pain to DHS processing can provoke ideas on what institutional change might have the most immediate effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHave you, your family, or close friends or colleagues ever experienced harm or mistreatment or threats in the past by anyone?\u201d This question highlights three sticking points in the translation of pain to a legible, communicable format. The first is suggested by the opening of the sentence: \u201cyou, your family, or close friends or colleagues.\u201d This suggests an understanding that pain is a social phenomenon. Writing on the colonial imposition of gender and the work of Oy\u00e9ronk\u00e9 Oyew\u00f9m\u00ed, however, Maria Lugones notes, \u201cIn her <\/span>The Invention of Women, <\/span><\/i>Oy\u00e9ronk\u00e9 Oyew\u00f9m\u00ed raises questions about the validity of patriarchy as a valid transcultural category\u2026 \u2019The usual gloss of the Yoruba categories <\/span>obinrin <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>okunrin <\/span><\/i>as \u2018female\/woman\u2019 and \u2018male\/man,\u2019 respectively, is a mistranslation. These categories are neither binarily opposed nor hierarchical.\u2019\u201d<\/span> [19] The social dynamics of any given locality are distorted by colonial mistranslation. This applies, too, to the issue of pain. We do not have adequate language for how one\u2019s country\u2019s pain can also belong intimately to one\u2019s own body, or how trauma experienced by a friend can have material effects on oneself. These networked pains are different, but very present. This social dimension of pain is one element disfigured in the fight for legibility, reduced to an either-or choice: \u201cyou, your family, or close friends or colleagues.\u201d Which one of you has pain? What to say if your pain is all tangled up with that of others?<\/span><\/p>\n

There are two additional, related ways in which pain is resistant to the legibility which this particular question requests. These are the nature of pain as a doing, and the stretched temporality of pain-time. When I call pain a \u201cdoing,\u201d I am challenging our usual conception of pain as a slippery kind of noun, an event or an object, a thing experienced. I am more aligned with Elaine Scarry\u2019s understanding of pain as a process or act in which something happens: \u201cTo witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language.\u201d<\/span> [20] This process cannot be captured in the neat language of \u201cexperienced harm or mistreatment or threats\u201d used by question 1A. Pain rather comes in waves and continues to unfold after the moment of the knife piercing skin or water filling lungs ends. The use of \u201cin the past\u201d in 1A points to a related issue in the translation of pain, namely, pain-time. The demand to recount pain is necessarily always figured as a request to speak in the past-tense, but this stands in conflict with the fact that pain\u2019s ongoing \u201cdoing\u201d can make the future or the possibility of a past that cannot be confirmed painful. It ignores the \u201cextension\u201d of pain-time, where distance is distorted between traumatic events and the present.<\/span> [21] Noting these resistant dimensions of pain both clarifies the destructive gaps of forms like I-589 and reveals the limitations of my own analysis. As I\u2019ve said previously, these are fundamental problems\u2014ontological problems\u2014with the nature of embodied pain. We need to move towards and through an asylum application system that not only captures depth of personhood without overwhelming resources, but also provides the best translation of pain possible despite the impossibility of exact articulation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/b><\/p>\n

While <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> pain experienced in <\/span>any<\/span><\/i> body is resistant to expression, it is important to differentiate between this general resistance and the specific illegibility of the Othered body in pain before normative structures such as the medical-industrial complex or DHS. This illegibility is a phenomenological structure, not an ontological necessity. It stems from a viewpoint of power that refuses to recognize pain in the Other as \u201creadable\u201d but rather as \u201cnoise.\u201d Though the fundamental issue of pain\u2019s resistance to language cannot be fixed, this disposition towards not seeing the pain of specific marginalized persons can be improved. I have argued that normative ways of seeing in the U.S. immigration system tend towards Othering asylum applicants under a variety of dehumanizing gazes. The burden of avoiding this projection, navigating this bias, and gaining the life-sustaining support which comes from being legible falls on the asylum applicant themselves. The applicant who chooses to attempt legibility must then work within the affective tones, bureaucratic language, and backdrop of precarity that the U.S. refugee context assumes. Even when this is done successfully, it still doesn\u2019t fully capture the nature of a refugee\u2019s claimed pain. The translation is partial rather than exact replication.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am hopeful that using phenomenological analysis in the way I have tried to here can offer us new critical directions toward justice in American studies and beyond. It is worth noting the irony of writing an analysis of illegibility by using the academic jargon of \u201cphenomenology\u201d and other terms similarly obscured from colloquial American language. The structures of illegibility I have highlighted in Form I-589 are recognizable in variations across American institutions, including the academy. This, I think, is the reflexive potential of phenomenology\u2014it provides tools to study the cycles by which discourses and embodied ways of moving, seeing, and being in the world reproduce one another. I employ it not as an ideological commitment so much as a reflexive methodology. In this case, when I point the phenomenological microscope back at this paper, I see the at-times dense language itself as an artifact of an educational system that, too, requires certain legibility rules be upheld in order to obtain belonging. The question of legibility politics is one that can and should be taken up by American studies scholars within our own disciplines as part of a praxis for justice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The roots of such a just practice must build on what survival skills the marginalized are already inventing and using in inspiring works of critical imagination. In essence, I am suggesting a two-pronged approach to pain studies as critical theory\u2014at once asking how to make institutional measures of legibility better while <\/span>also<\/span><\/i> seeking to recover the suppressed embodied experience and legibility labor not caught by such measures. These intentions have real import across a large swath of American institutions and objects, which, when studied closely, reveal their true purpose as pain management: The insurance claim form for a broken arm on the job, the class action case against the management company allowing illegal amounts of lead paint in low-income housing, the process of triage in an emergency room, and the twelve-point font of Form I-589.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u201cFentanyl,\u201d Workplace Safety & Health Topics, The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed June 30, 2021, <\/span>https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/niosh\/topics\/fentanyl\/default.html<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Sara Ahmed, \u201cOrientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,\u201d <\/span>GLQ <\/span><\/i>12, no. 4 (2006), 544.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Salimah Meghani, Eeeseung Byun, and Rollin Gallagher, \u201cTime to Take Stock: A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review of Analgesic Treatment Disparities for Pain in the United States,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Pain Medicine<\/span><\/i> 13, no. 2 (2012): 150\u2013174.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Karen Calderone, \u201cThe Influence of Gender on the Frequency of Pain and Sedative Medication Administered to Postoperative Patients,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Sex Roles<\/span><\/i>\u00a023 (199)):<\/span>\u00a0<\/b>713\u2013725.<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Iris Marion Young, \u201cThrowing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,\u201d <\/span>Human Studies <\/span><\/i>3, no. 1 (1980), 138.<\/span><\/li>\n
  6. Lisa Guenther, \u201cCritical Phenomenology,\u201d in <\/span>50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology<\/span><\/i>, ed. Gayle Salamon, Ann V. Murphy, and Gail Weiss (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 15.<\/span><\/li>\n
  7. Saidiya Hartman, \u201cVenus in Two Acts,\u201d <\/span>Small Axe <\/span><\/i>12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1-14.<\/span><\/li>\n
  8. Mariana Ortega, \u201cBodies of Color, Bodies of Sorrow: On Resistant Sorrow, Aesthetic Unsettlement, and Becoming-With,\u201d <\/span>Critical Philosophy of Race <\/span><\/i>7, no. 1 (2019), 139.<\/span><\/li>\n
  9. Or, put another way, they do not fail at all. If measures like the asylum application for the United States have a primary function not of <\/span>helping<\/span><\/i> refugees, but of <\/span>limiting<\/span><\/i> immigration, then their rate of success increases significantly. I choose to study I-589 as a failed object here because it allows me to consider how people filling out the form, seeking the concrete objective of asylum status, might come across barriers in the form itself to their goal.<\/span><\/li>\n
  10. \u00a0<\/span>The myriad of historical examples in which the powerful have degraded and killed marginalized persons through pseudo-scientific objectification of their pain response is a direct effect of the phenomenological distance which characterizes oppression. Repeating incidents of refugees\u2019 pain and trauma here, I worry, only reopens wounds that are not mine to open. I am not here to reenact the spectacle of hurt. My challenge, rather, is to write critically and precisely about something that I argue is fundamentally resistant to expression: pain. To talk about the struggle against oppression as a struggle for pain legibility requires pinpointing how the struggle is kept so illegible in the first place more than it does recounting the pain itself. In other words, I want to recognize the barriers facing those Othered by the American Department of Homeland Security and the techniques which those persons might use to navigate them more than the experiences of trauma themselves. For this reason, this essay does not contain descriptions of trauma itself.<\/span><\/li>\n
  11. Hortense J. Spillers, \u201cMama\u2019s Baby, Papa\u2019s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,\u201d <\/span>Diacritics <\/span><\/i>17, no. 2 (Summer 1987), 67.<\/span><\/li>\n
  12. Spillers, \u201cMama\u2019s Baby,\u201d 79.<\/span><\/li>\n
  13. Harvey Young, <\/span>Embodying Black Experience <\/span><\/i>(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 121.<\/span><\/li>\n
  14. Didier Fassin and Estelle D\u2019Halluin, \u201cCritical Evidence: The Politics of Trauma in French Asylum Policies,\u201d <\/span>ETHOS <\/span><\/i>35, no. 3 (2007), 110.<\/span><\/li>\n
  15. Fassin and D\u2019Halluin, \u201cCritical Evidence,\u201d 325.<\/span><\/li>\n
  16. Andrea Pitts, \u201cEmbodied Thresholds of Sanctuary: Abolitionism and Trans Worldmaking,\u201d <\/span>LGBTQ Issues in Philosophy <\/span><\/i>18, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 7.<\/span><\/li>\n
  17. Lauren Berlant, <\/span>Cruel Optimism <\/span><\/i>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 192. In this case, the unstable system is asylum law that works unevenly to protect refugees at some points but not at others; the subject of such precarious living is the asylum applicant.<\/span><\/li>\n
  18. Pitts, \u201cEmbodied,\u201d 7.<\/span><\/li>\n
  19. Maria Lugones, \u201cThe Coloniality of Gender,\u201d <\/span>Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise <\/span><\/i>(Spring 2008), 8.<\/span><\/li>\n
  20. Elaine Scarry, <\/span>The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World <\/span><\/i>(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 6.<\/span><\/li>\n
  21. Scarry, <\/span>The Body in Pain, <\/span><\/i>55.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Bailey Flynn is a PhD candidate based in the Department of Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Gender Studies Program at Northwestern University. She is a researcher, writer, and community advocate, working with organizations including Resilience (formerly Rape Victim Advocates) and the Chicago Torture Justice Center. Her current research focuses on the articulation of physical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19530,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19530"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":345,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}