technologies of love

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.

The body in pain is a deviant body that defies expectations, refuses the easy boxes of sick and well. I am trying to figure out how to love a body in pain, or feel desire with a body in pain. The fibers of my muscles ache, and the muscles supporting the joints tense up around the pain. My skin often feels like it is burning, and that is not merely skin as symptom. That is the same skin that welcomes or repels touch. I have only one body to use, inside the doctor’s office and out. My body remembers old embraces, skin-to-skin contact from before as well as now. Now there is a barrier between myself and other bodies: this pain. 


 Desire is a different substance now, a process requiring attention and effort. It is no longer a thoughtless release. Pain sex is queer sex, strange sex, wrong sex. Even in the comfort of a therapist’s office, the assumption is that everyone must be having sex and must produce the requisite amount of desire. I have been encouraged and maybe even shamed a bit to get up to a normal level of sexual production because “sex is good.” I agree with this, and it is important to feel connected to my partner in this way, but sex and desire are very complicated for people whose central nervous systems scream at them. Sex is a complex and fraught dance, an intellectually draining circus to run. After I manage to have sex, I often collapse for a few days from the effort of being in my body and sorting the signals of pain and desire. Yet I am continually pushed to conform. It’s not that I don’t want to have sex; it’s that my partner and I are in the midst of tentatively creating what sex looks like for someone with chronic pain and her partner, and I don’t see this image of desire anywhere—not in movies, not in what I read. As Lazy Rane writes on the blog Guerrilla Feminism: Global and Intersectional, “I believe that a body in pain, is a body which is particularly hard to love, and scarily easy to hate. What is worse, the pain can make this hatred of your own body seem not only reasonable, but inescapable, so blatant in its normality that it can take a long time to challenge your own feelings.” Desire and love have to grapple first with reconstituting themselves in a body that has been altered to its core.

“There is nothing more vulnerable than caring for someone; it means not only giving your energy to that which is not you but also caring for that which is beyond or outside your control. Caring is anxious—to be full of care, to be careful, is to take care of things by becoming anxious about their future, where the future is embodied in the fragility of an object whose persistence matters. Becoming caring is not about becoming good or nice: people who have “being caring” as their ego ideal often act in quite uncaring ways in order to protect their good image of themselves. To care is not about letting an object go but holding on to an object by letting oneself go, giving oneself over to something that is not one’s own.”

“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful, because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.”