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This chapter examines the role of emotions and feelings in pain perception and explores how mind/body dualisms impinge on conceptualizations of pain. An embodied approach to pain as an ongoing structure of lived experience is, the authors suggest, able to transcend many former dichotomous modes of western thought, thereby reconciling mind with body, biology with culture, reason with emotion, and championing the (biographical) voice of the lifeworld over the dominant (dispassionate) voice of medicine. People in pain need to find meaning for their symptoms, however inappropriate or anti-therapeutic this may seem from an orthodox biomedical viewpoint. This biographical search for meaning, in turn, calls for the development of ever more sensitive qualitative methodologies which, in contrast to so-called objective measures, capture the emotional and cultural significance of pain in complex, subtle and sophisticated ways through a commitment to lived experience and the mindful body. Whilst all the interviewees acknowledged the existence in some form or other of emotional pain, physical pain, in the form of acute, readily observable symptoms, elicited more legitimacy, sympathy and respect. Men, however, were more likely to separate out these definitions, to ascribe a hierarchy of respectability to different types of pain, and were more reluctant to consider emotional pain as real pain. Women, in contrast, although making similar distinctions, tended to operate with more holistic, integrated notions of pain, meanings which, again, were difficult to access using anything other than qualitative methods. To conclude, the authors suggest that, despite the so-called natural assumptions made about female biology, the attribution to men and women of differential capacities for experiencing, expressing, understanding and responding to pain is primarily linked to gender-differentiated processes of socialization and emotion management.

This chapter attempts to clarify some of the confusion now surrounding the term emotion work, which has been adopted, adapted or criticized to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming a catch-all cliché. As the authors argue, the exploration of socially regulated or managed gender divisions in intimate emotional behaviour entails two interrelated, yet distinct, questions. Are men and women equally susceptible to emotions or discourse of love and intimacy? and Do they handle such emotions in similar ways in the context of these close personal relationships? Using evidence from a variety of recent research, the authors begin by trying to find empirical examples of the kinds of emotion work that women and men do in heterosexual couple relationships. This evidence indeed appears to conform to gender stereotypes of Stepford wives and hollow men. However, as the authors argue, this is partly a product of the conceptual and methodological problems involved in researching men's and women's performance of emotion work. In raising these issues, they then proceed to use recent theories of gender pluralism and doing gender in order to discuss Hochschild's work and psychodynamic theory, which suggests that doing emotion work may lead to a loss of authenticity. Finally, drawing upon their own research on couples, they show how attempts by individual men and women to preserve their sense of authenticity may vary, depending on what the authors term their core identities. In doing so, they attempt to clarify some of the conceptual confusion that surrounds the term emotion work, a concept, they suggest, which has been adopted, adapted or criticized to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming a catch-all cliché.

This article attempts to bring these theoretical issues to bear on an empirical study of pain and gender, illustrating how cultural responses are crucial to the understanding of pain and embodiment. Pain is never the sole creation of our anatomy and physiology. Rather, it emerges only at the intersection of bodies, minds and cultures. As well as being a medical problem, pain is an everyday experience and whilst the medical voice is a valid one, other voices, especially those of the subject, are often lost in the neglected encounter between pain and meaning. As one has argued, an embodied approach to pain as an ongoing structure of lived experience is able to transcend many former dichotomous modes of western thought, thereby reconciling mind with body, biology with culture, reason with emotion, and championing the voice of the life world over the dominant voice of medicine. People in pain need to find meaning and legitimacy for their symptoms, however inappropriate or anti-therapeutic this may seem from an orthodox biomedical viewpoint. One has argued that the field of pain perception has traditionally been dominated by the scientific somatico-technical approach, resulting in parallel divides between mind and body, emotion and sensation, and a faulty-machine model of embodiment.

The article focuses on the October 1998 issue of the book "The Lived Body." It critically examines the notion of human embodiment in both classical and contemporary social thought. The ideas of a range of key thinkers are assessed in terms of the bodily themes and issues they address. By using the notion of embodiment to transcend the dualist legacies of the past, this book argues that the body is not simply a "textual effect" or "discursive construct." Rather, embodiment is the active basis of being in the world, and the foundation of self, meaning, culture and society. It is not therefore a question of choosing between experience and representation, but of exploring their dialectical relationship to one another, and the emergent properties contained therein. These issues are illustrated through a variety of themes, including the "fate" of embodiment in late modernity, sex, gender and the medical treatment of the body, the sociology of emotions, pain, sleep and artistic images and representations of the body.