The cartography of pain: spatial, social, and biographical disorientation in Suzanne E. Berger’s Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile (1996)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article deals with the concept of disorientation as intrinsic to the experience of chronic pain and disability, implying the disruption of spatial directionality and biographical continuity. This experience of spatial and existential displacement is the critical point of Suzanne E. Berger’s chronic pain memoir Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile (1996). Building upon Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of orientation, this essay looks into two dimensions of the experience of disorientation narrated by Berger: (1) the dismantlement of the familiarity with the domestic realm and the transformation of affective relationships in that space; (2) the impact of illness and disability in the public world and the dynamics of power between “straightness” and otherness. The textual analysis concludes with a reflection about the regained sense of possibility or potential for change that biographical writing brings to the ill subject.