Chronic Pain, BDSM and Crip Time

This book is a critical disability studies examination of the lived experience of chronic pain, engaging with and making a significant contribution to crip theory and the concept of ‘crip time’.

Exploring experiences of pain and fatigue for people who live with chronic pain and based on narratives told through in-depth detailed interviews interwoven with theory at the cutting edge of critical disability studies, it demonstrates that our knowledge and understanding of chronic pain is incomplete without a critical disability studies approach. Through conceptualizing the concept of ‘crip time’ via participants’ narratives of living with chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and variable disabilities, this book demonstrates how thinking about chronic pain and fatigue with ‘crip time’ exposes normative, ableist, assumptions underlying both how pain and the ideas of cure and recovery are understood.

It will be of interest to all academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, critical disability studies, crip theory, medical sociology, sexuality, and studies of embodiment, corporeality, and temporality more generally.

Emma Sheppard is a lecturer in Sociology at Coventry University. Her research interests encompass disability, sexuality, and time.