The performative reading May and the Potentiality of Pain takes as its starting point the montage essay May och smärta utan smärtan (published in Paletten, #2 2014), which explores and reconsiders the bodily experiences of the hunger-striking militant British suffragettes. In literary retakes of past events, the project carries out a comparative reading of two different approaches to pain as an act of resistance. Departing from an approach to physical pain as a world-destroying, life-negating phenomenon (Scarry, 1985), the work centres on the vital and transformative reality of pain. By displacing activities conducted by the universal, moral subject, the reading gives priority to pre- and impersonal relations of pain, ethical relations and connections that are ontologically prior to activities of a coherent, stable self. Unlike the work of the moral agent, ethical relations do not negate, avoid, or eliminate pain. They are not in opposition to pain. The aim of the project was to excavate the hidden potential of hungering bodies who already persevere in the dissonant life of chronic pain, and have come to know themselves well enough to do away with a recurrence of negative affect. The work started out as an experimental exercise in artistic essaying, later on assuming various permutations such as performative readings and an illustrated paper presentation.

Although the project was employing speculative writing to substantiate the philosophical assumptions made in the work, the reading was based on the archives of real life suffragette May Billinghurst. A determining factor for selecting this particular life story was the fact that Billinghurst was a differently-abled Women´s Right´s activist. In 1913, she was sentenced to eight months imprisonment for participation in a WSPU (Women´s Social and Political Union) pillar box raid. During the trial, she was advised against resorting to hunger strike tactics on the basis that such action would cause her all the more pain. Nonetheless, amongst the hunger-striking suffragettes, May was the exceptional one…