Remembering Pain Otherwise: Disability, Enclosed Surfacing, and Crip Memory

By tracing the sticky history between pain and disability studies, this paper examines how chronic pain is either excluded from the debate or framed as a problem of the body itself. To address these resulting tensions, we articulate the phenomenology of enclosed surfacing to describe how chronic pain can make the body feel like a closed container-where pain circulates inwardly and feels unmediated-rather than shaped through relation and histories of meaning. We then develop crip memory as a method for attending to pain otherwise: as something carried, remembered, and transmitted across time, place, and relation. Through narrative, we show how memory, as both medium and practice, keeps pain in relation rather than enclosing it. We name crip accompaniment as a way of being carried and oriented by the reverberations of others' pained memories in ways that sustain survival and orient us toward collective disabled futurities.