Abstract:
This thesis is about chronic pain. Mysteries and intimacies of pain elude analysis. Through ethnographic fieldwork and public health initiatives at the Coordinated Homeless Outreach Center (CHOC) in Norristown, Pennsylvania, expressions of pain were ubiquitous. Biomedicine has inadequately addressed chronic pain, which resists biomedicine's objective framework. Drawing from Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s (1992) concept of "body praxis" which politicizes the body to reveal the social origins of suffering, pain critiques the social and medical etiologies and expressions of suffering. Responding to two homeless individuals in chronic pain, I argue that pain is a form of protest through which Joycelyn and Jack make their suffering known from within the walls of the CHOC located in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia.
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