Over the past decade, we have each had pronounced experiences with pain which have punctuated our ongoing conversations about literature, queer theory, feminism, and daily life. While we have casually mused about the relationship between our experiences of pain and our sexual identity, this conversation is an attempt to explore such issues more fully.
Ruthann Robson: When I was enduring lots of physical pain and trying to cope with it, I looked to writings by other lesbians. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that in lesbian and feminist theorizing, there seems to be more depth in the work on erotica and S/M than in health issues. Even in health crisis narratives, the experience of pain is noted, but essentially unexplored.
Sima Rabinowitz: There does seem to be a tendency in writing by (maybe even about) lesbians to link most subjects to our sexuality in its narrower sense—the sex in sexuality. Not that this is a simple or uninteresting or uncomplicated subject, of course. And clearly it has a lot to do with the larger complex of issues we might call “identity.” But it does seem to exclude as much as it includes, excluding, in fact, many ideas and experiences that are essentially physical in nature, such as pain.
RR: But pain is also emotional, no? And so variant. My pain has usually been of the type clinically described as “acute”: severe pain mostly caused by the treatments I endured for cancer, a major and some minor surgeries, and chemotherapy with the accompanying drugs to diminish the side effects, which themselves sometimes caused excruciating pain.
SR: The whole of my adult life, the last twenty-five years essentially, has been informed by a chronic medical condition that causes severe and persistent pain. Because no treatment I have undergone has been successful (surgery, medication), living with pain has become a natural (if not normal) aspect of my life.
RR: Well, at the risk of essentializing lesbian identity by extending it beyond sexual activity, do you think there is a connection between your experience of pain and your sexual identity? I’ve read about some of the studies which argue that pain is culturally constructed because persons in different cultures experience it differently. Do you think your own experience of pain is related somehow to your sexuality?
SR: Absolutely. First, when I’m in pain, engrossing, consuming, debilitating pain, I don’t feel sexy, I don’t feel sexual, and I don’t feel like having sex. But, because I’m in a committed monogamous relationship, when I realize I’ve been living for a long time without sex, I worry about (what now seems a very old cliché) “lesbian bed-death.” Am I really a lesbian if I’m not having (lesbian) sex? This, obviously, is still about the relationship of sexuality primarily to sex. But for me it’s more complicated than that. When I’m in pain, I feel ugly. When I feel ugly, I feel unfeminine, when I feel unfeminine my idea about what it means to be a lesbian gets tangled up in a very confused way with my physical distress, with my pain. At this point the relationship between my sexual identity and my experience as a body in pain becomes very perplexing, but also very interesting to me. Has your experience of pain related to your sexuality in any way?
RR: I’ve thought more about the relationship from the opposite perspective—how my sexual identity affects my experience of pain. It seems to me that in America, co-existing with the material commercial culture’s messages that pain should be vanquished by products (from aspirin to opiates), subjective experiences of pain are mediated by both Puritanism and a masculine frontierism. So, as a dyke who forged an identity somewhere between Hester Prynne and Matt Dillon, I find it difficult to be anything other than stoic. Hold your head high and silent above the scarlet letter and take a swig of whiskey while old Doc cuts the bullet out of your leg. This tendency became apparent to me when I reflected on my experience after a major surgery. The “pain doctors” attempting to calibrate my medications visited me several times a day to ask me something like, “On a scale of one to ten, how severe is your pain?” I always answered “four,” despite the doctors’ continual interrogations and raised eyebrows. But really, four seemed such a tolerable number! Never mind that I couldn’t sit up in bed without tears streaming down my face, and felt as if my torso had been the target for a cannon. It was my dyke self, I think, which never let me consider that my pain might be more like twelve on a scale of one to ten.
SR: My experience of the way my condition might “present” in the medical and social sense of these terms is similar. If one expresses an intolerance for pain, there is the risk of being considered “weak” or “dependent” or “girlish” or “childlike.” And, as you point out, the larger social-cultural message is that pain can be conquered with pills (or injections or ointments or some combination thereof). So the message might be, “Just shut up and be a big boy (read: dyke) about it.” Or, “If you’re in pain, you’re choosing to be in pain.” I hear echoes, reverberations of so many other messages in that one.
RR: Such as New Age and alternative healing, which are so popular with many lesbians. I have to say that I believe in a mind-body connection but find that too often it’s distorted into causal relations, with our mental (or spiritual) state being the prime mover. This may be more pronounced with regard to pain, because it is a subjective experience. The subjectivity of pain also troubles my dyke relations. As obvious as it may be, whenever I am in pain—or with someone else who’s in pain—I’m conscious of the disconnectivity that the body imposes. I suppose it’s this “gap” that we try to bridge—and do bridge—in sexual “connection.”
SR: I believe in the mind-body connection, too. This is why I find considerations of sex-sexuality-identity so fascinating and also so confusing. No part of me, not even my pain, is mind or body alone, or is alone in mind or in body. Pain is isolating, separating me from myself and from others, including the “other” who’s most important to me, my lover. When I’m in pain, it sometimes seems that my most important relationship is with that pain, battling with it, berating it, bargaining with it, begging it. So, on one level there is a very basic kind of distance and alienation from my lover that we both experience when I’m in a lot of pain.
But there’s another kind of disconnection, too, one that arises from my not wanting to be taken care of, not wanting to be anything but an equal partner in our relationship, not wanting to be the weak, sickly one. I am conscious of wanting, as a lesbian, to see my relationship as one between equals. The pain diminishes the ability and the opportunity to perceive myself as an equal, and this sense of being “less than,” coupled with my lack of desire when I’m in pain, is utterly tied up with my sense of myself as a lesbian. On the other hand, from what I read and hear many women say, I realize how much of an advantage it is to be unwell in a relationship with a woman partner. My lover is more helpful and more understanding than I suspect most men in heterosexual partnerships would be.
RR: I agree that it’s probably easier for a woman to be in pain and have a lesbian partner than a male partner, over-generalized as this observation may be. So, in one sense, I feel gratitude. But gratitude can be uncomfortable. As you say, there is a consciousness of wanting to be equals, of not being dependent. So, I think my experience of being so filled with pain as to be absolutely dependent has altered me and all my relationships, including the one with my lover.
After I’d gone through some very painful experiences, my lover had to have a relatively minor surgery with IV anesthesia. The anesthesiologist must have seen me wince as he inserted the needle, because he turned to me and said, “Oh don’t worry, it hurts the person watching more than the person getting the IV.” And I quickly said, “No. No it doesn’t.” Once I might have believed him, but now I know that watching pain is very different from experiencing pain. That consciousness of separation from my lover is a change for me. Perhaps it is uniquely lesbian because lesbians are presumed to “merge” (according to psychologists), so this separation seems more shocking.
SR: In an odd way, my life partner and I are most ourselves and least inclined to confuse our own lives, our situations, even our pain, when we relate to each other sexually. When we lose ourselves in each other as lovers, we are clearer about our separateness, our individuality. Pain diminishes my capacity for that kind of desired separateness and imposes instead a kind of isolation. Pain deprives me not only of physical pleasure, but of something much deeper and more necessary in my life as a lesbian—of a healthy relationship with my lover.
RR: I agree that physical pain causes the subjective experience of isolation and the ability to connect. This seems to me true, not only because the pain cannot be physically communicated, but also because it is an inarticulate and nonverbal experience. This quality of pain may not be uniquely lesbian, but for those of us whose sexuality is somehow intertwined with language, it is a further problem with pain. It is not only how to describe it to others, but also how to recognize it in ourselves. There are many dykes who “came out” through books—by reading narratives and recognizing ourselves and our desires. There doesn’t seem to be anything similar with regard to pain.
SR: Do we avoid writing about our pain for the reason we did not write for so many decades about sex, about lesbian sex? Is it too intimate, too personal, too dangerous?
RR: Or, like sex, we don’t have the vocabulary for it. And the development of the vocabulary, like that for sex, has been both vague and hackneyed: can we really describe experience on a scale of one to ten? Is it a burning pain, sharp pain, dull pain? I have to admit that during some intense experiences of pain I have tried to verbalize it. Complex metaphor usually escapes me at such moments, but even trying to be accurate, the expressions are metaphoric, as are even most common: “burning” and “sharp.” Pain is not fire or a knife. But what is it?
SR: It is everything and nothing. It is pure body and no body at all. It is literally a metaphor. It is a metaphor made literal. It is a part of myself that is utterly foreign in its familiarity and familiar in its foreign-ness. I am not my pain, I am not my pain, I am not my pain. That’s what I tell myself.
I hate to think of anyone in severe pain, but I’m comforted, in some way, to know that your pain does not cause you as much psychic distress as it might, and that it is also a part of recovery, even survival. My pain, on the other hand, is something that is not life-threatening but that is also not fixable, something that has not been able to be repaired or cured. So when it feels unbearable, that is, in part, because it feels relentless and unending. So I ask myself, then, as you have asked, what does pain mean? Does it sound silly and unreasonable to say that it serves as a reminder that I am body as much as mind, that everything we are (women, dykes, writers) is as much about what we cannot describe and quantify as it is about what we can and do attempt to define and assess?
Ruthann Robson is professor of law at the City University of New York School of Law and the author of the novel a/k/a (1997), as well as other collections of fiction. Sima Rabinowitz is a freelance writer and editor in Minneapolis. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Witness, The Brooklyn Review, Elixir, and other publications.
