Pain

Is there a difference in perception of pain and discomfort between someone who was born with a disability and someone who developed one later in life? How should it be portrayed separately?

In short, yes, but as always, I think it is deeply specific to the individuals. I usually answer this by turning to the experiences of d/Deaf people. The distinction here between lowercase deaf vs. uppercase Deaf signals the difference between one who is hard of hearing or hearing impaired but did not grow up with Deaf education or Deaf community vs. those who were socialized into Deaf culture, which may include those who were born to Deaf parents or have Deaf family. In this case, many Deaf people resent the belief that deafness needs to be cured and see Deafness as a cultural identity - in fact, some Deaf people refuse to identify as disabled because they see it as a stigmatizing term for what is really a point of pride. For someone who becomes deaf later in life, this sense of cultural connection and belonging in Deaf community may feel distant or even uncomfortable. Many people who become disabled later in life often are confronting ableism for the first time and as a result don't always develop disability consciousness in the ways those who have been born disabled may have done earlier. These temporal differences exemplify why it is reductive to refer to "disability" as a single, static monolith. 

Do you feel the idea of pain varies cross-culturally?

Yes, and I think recent anthropological and sociological studies prove this (I'm thinking here about books by Joanna Bourke, Javier Moscoso, and most recently Rob Boddice). The way pain is understood and (de)valued is historically, geographically, and culturally contingent, and I think any theory of pain which assumes it's applicable across time and space erases a lot of the very specific nuances of pain that may surprise us.

In your paper, you mention a quote from Joanna Bourke which says "pain-talk is swollen with metaphor, simile, metonym, and analogy" (Bourke 53). With this being said, how does the way in which society discusses pain at a clinical level also serves as an example of illness poetics? Furthermore, how does the use of metaphors and symbols for pain serve as literary devices conveying the infantilization of persons with disabilities?

I quoted Bourke there for her quiet rebuttal of Elaine Scarry who claimed in 1985 that pain destroys language and is therefore unsharable and unknowable. The people I know who live with pain are effusive storytellers, and it becomes very evident that it's really our societal failure to attend to these stories that is the problem. Susan Sontag, in her 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor, infamously made the claim that the healthiest way of being ill is to resist metaphor entirely. For her, the military metaphor (the idea that we "fight" cancer or people "lose the battle against x" or that medications "kill" off disease or that our immune system "defends" against outsiders) imports a kind of violence into how we talk about illness and disability and suggests "winners" and "losers." Sontag, of course, ironically deploys metaphor all over her essay, which we might read as Sontag's own acknowledgement that metaphor is one of the primary ways we make meaning through language. Later responses to Sontag have emphasized that maybe the issue isn't that metaphor= bad but that we need to expand the metaphors we have for things like pain and disability. What would it mean to embrace how disabled people use metaphor in ways that aren't deductible to infantilization or ableism? How can healthcare settings encourage the co-creation of metaphors with their patients?