Situating the Reader of the Illness Essay, within the Illness Essay

Abstract

This article examines Eula Biss’ essay “The Pain Scale” (2005) in relation to Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge. Biss begins and ends with an observational point zero—no pain as a supposedly neutral baseline—contrasting the pain scale with other numerical and descriptive measures, as well as the fragmented, language-defying realities of pain. And yet, subjectivity is not the enemy of quantification in this essay. This article approaches Biss’ text through the autotheoretical essay as a mode of interaction between both, exploring how the interaction between partial perspectives on chronic pain present the subject as both knowing and known, thereby investigating how this positioning shapes the individual’s self-experience of pain.