her book Dolerse—the title is the Spanish verb meaning “to be in pain”—she attempts to construct and deconstruct the pervasiveness of pain in modern Mexican society. “Pain is a complex phenomenon which, in the first place, calls into question our most basic notions of what constitutes reality,” she writes. “Pain not only destroys, but produces reality.” The “social languages” of pain are, in fact, “political languages” as well, “languages in which bodies decipher their power relationships with other bodies.” Thus, at a political and social level, she argues, “the language of pain becomes a
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