Paper short abstract:

Persons in pain, suffering from Fibromyalgia, experience negotiations of displacement and otherness in relation to their transgressing of boundaries between accepted images of "sick" and "healthy". Hence, they challenge the dualistic perception of body/mind and call for other ethical concerns.

Paper long abstract:

Fibromyalgia (FMS) is a chronic suffering of pain in muscles and bones and other disorders in the body. It cannot be diagnosed by means of objective measurements and observations on the body; the diagnosis is determined on the basis of subjective experiences of bodily pain and disorder, indicated by the patient. The Cartesian dualism between body and mind is still dominating in medical and generic understandings of healthiness and disease, and the biological citizenship, proved by instrumental measures of biological facts (Rose and Novas, 2004) creates further insistence that measurable evidence for certain medical determinants is clear. This means that medical categories of diagnoses are tightened, boundaries are enforced, and FMS constitutes a contested place, because vague and blurry ailments are difficult to grasp in medical discourse.

FMS sufferers experience embodied pain out of place, both when in contact with the medical system, and in general, because their bodies in pain and disorder prevent them from participating in social life on expected conditions; they transgress the established boundaries between "sick" and "healthy". Their situation is negotiated regarding degrees of otherness according to un/accepted ailments and ill behavior. These persons feel pain, and their desire is to enter a pathological position of otherness, resulting in an acceptance of their embodied pain. However, this desired place of otherness is contested, i.e. because of their bodily, visual performance, and hence, due to the Cartesian dualism between body and mind, their position of otherness is at times displaced and understood as a psychological disorder.