Agency Without Mastery: Chronic Pain and Posthuman Life Writing

This article examines how recent life writing about chronic pain produces a relational autobiographical subject possessing agency-without-mastery; it analyzes how such a subject challenges the humanist legacy embedded in life writing and clinical discourse about pain, and expresses a potentially posthuman view of relationships, environments, embodiment, and temporality; and it brings a feminist analysis to bear on the ethical issues posthumanism raises in the domain of life writing about chronic pain.