Side Wound Summer

In bed, healing from gender-affirming top surgery, the author takes the reader into the wound and through different textures of pain, reflecting on how pain transforms and fails to transform subjectivity. In a post-Catholic fascination with suffering, sainthood and medical drama TV shows, ‘Side Wound Summer’ conceptualizes the crip body as an altar, and a choreography of pain as worship. The performance of pain and what depends on it, particularly as chronically ill, disabled and transgender people engaging with the medical-industrial complex, carves out potential for both refusal and solidarity.