Suffering Cyborgs: Inhuman Pain, Human Subjects

TL;DRAbstract

Popular culture in the U.S. has long constructed disability as a condition that results in inevitable suffering. The presumed link between disability and pain forms the basis of very concrete instances of disability oppression, but pain still remains a highly contentious and rarely discussed topic within disability studies. Suffering Cyborgs: Inhuman Pain, Human Subjects aims to address this gap through a critical theory examination of two seemingly contradictory cultural discourses of pain: popular culture narratives that construct pain as an inhuman experience and representations of cyborgs in films and television that deploy pain as a narrative device to humanize the inhuman. \nThe thesis examines Time magazine cover articles written over the last ten years as case-study examples of the more pervasive discourse of pain as a dehumanizing experience. It then looks at this construction against the television show Caprica, which uses pain as a marker of humanness in the less-than-human

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