Saloni Trivedi

The Poetics of Pain: Examining Gendered Counterfactuals and the Language of Chronic Illness

Graduating Year: 2027

Mentor: Thea Strand 

Chronic pain is a pervasive yet often misunderstood condition that eludes precise linguistic articulation. As of 2021, of the approximately 50 million Americans experiencing chronic pain, 28 million identified as  women (Rikard et al. 2023). Concurrently, gender stereotypes contribute to bias toward the underestimation of pain in female patients (Zhang et al. 2021). While these biases impact medical diagnoses and treatments, language itself plays a crucial role in how individuals process and communicate their pain. Previous literature has found poetry to be therapeutic for trauma victims and those experiencing loss, allowing them to engage with their trauma narrative and multi-faceted emotions (Gold 2014). One linguistic structure particularly relevant to discussions of pain expression is counterfactual tense, which describes what might have been and creates unrealized alternative worlds. Negative emotion is linked to increased counterfactual tense usage (Nakamichi 2019). This interdisciplinary research project analyzes counterfactual tense in 20th and 21st-century publications of English-language Western poetry to address how gender influences the expression of chronic pain in poetry and asks, through a survey methodology, how readers, both those experiencing and not experiencing chronic pain, interpret these varying representations. Thus, this project aims to highlight the potential value of poetry in the conceptualization and communication of chronic pain.