Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

abstract:

While there is voluminous literature on pain in the context of medicine, pain as an aesthetic, representational, and epistemological issue remains undertheorized. The present article, after reviewing the nature of pain and surveying the emerging interdisciplinary field of graphic medicine, seeks to close-read sections of Georgia Webber's Dumb (2018) to demonstrate how the artist transforms the inexpressibility and invisibility of pain into a visual and sensate language. Webber's Dumb articulates a complex sense of pain, in which pain is conceived at once as a generative and also as a disabling force. Webber not only transforms pain into a knowable sensation but also teases out the relationship of pain with the creation of comics—artisanal labor—itself. This article also draws attention to the potential of the comics medium in visualizing and expressing pain, and it concludes by showing how pain is at once biological, cultural, and social.