Stigma, liminality, and chronic pain: Mind–body borderlands

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I employ the concept of “liminality” to answer the question, why is pain, something invisible and experienced by everyone, so often stigmatizing in its chronic form? Various authors' work on liminality argues that “betwixt and between,” ambiguous beings are seen by those around them to threaten prevailing definitions of the social order. I show that certain features of chronic pain result in the perception of sufferers as transgressing the categorical divisions between mind and body and as confounding the codes of morality surrounding sickness and health, turning them into liminal creatures whose uncertain ontological status provokes stigmatizing reactions in others.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 299 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.