Bodies, Pain, Gender: Trans Pain and Creation (English Thesis)
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Authors
Amanda Baker
Issue Date
2026
Type
Language
Keywords
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Abstract
Contemporary media representations of trans life overwhelmingly fixate experiences of pain, but it’s a pain framed for the cis gaze, and which often works to perpetuate single stories of trans identity. There remains a dearth of stories about trans people which actually grapple with our perspectives, about the pain that comes from living in a body which doesn’t feel like our own and in a society which treats us like we don’t belong. The experience of intense pain, argues Elaine Scarry, is one that resists and actively destroys communication through language. This verbal incommunicability of pain, Scarry worries, will work to open the rhetorical room for misdescriptions of pain meant to further entrench power. Though the sensation of pain is universal, Scarry’s philosophy of pain holds particular relevance for transgender people, a group for whom articulations of their own identity often hinge upon descriptions of their pain. This experience of trans pain may have an internal, inborn component, but is equally, if not moreso, created and shaped by the hegemonic, cisnormative discourses of gender and the gender binary, and this reality is what is often erased in representations which cater to the cis gaze. The recent rhetorical centering of “trans joy” works to combat this to establish a language of trans subjectivity, but a centering of joy in the place of trans pain leaves both the reality of trans pain at an individual and social level and the language used to communicate it unexamined. My thesis “Bodies, Pain, Gender: Trans Pain and Creation” will present expand upon Scarry’s theoretical framework of pain to highlight the strengths and inadequacies of the existing narratives we turn to to verbalize trans pain when that pain robs us of language and examine how they can be expanded upon to build a trans subjectivity.