Coping with chronic pain in everyday life: The case of the Fibromyalgia Syndrome

Having and being a body are proof of a perfectly accomplished embodiment and allow the subject to participate in a coherent system of meaning. When chronic pain creeps into life, the corporality undergoes an irreconcilable fracture, uncertainty takes the place of obviousness and a different relationship between the self and society becomes necessary. Therefore, it is possible to describe the disease as an extra-ordinary event that violently bursts onto the scene of life experiences. Through the anthropological approach, and starting from my fieldwork research, the aim of my paper will be to frame the disorders know as ‘Central Sensitivity Syndromes’ and specifically Fibromyalgia Syndrome. Analysing fibromyalgia means to treat a disease that in the biomedical domain is known to be unexplainable while, in a deeper and social dimension, responds to the law of naturalisation in the name of a higher dichotomy: that between normal and pathological, norm and deviance. Through my analysis I will illustrate how the medical gaze, as a technology of power, reproduces a dominant discourse by transforming an individual sign into a symptom of disease. At the same time, I will investigate the creative uses of the body as a field of renegotiation of one’s ‘being there,’ and demonstrate how disease becomes a voice which examines the experience and testifies to a crisis, a doubt, a provocative pretext to re-create oneself and the relationship with the surrounding reality. The healing thus resides in a symbolic efficacy - no longer therapeutic - in a self-care capable of ensuring recovery and subversion attempts.