Pain and the Making of Society: From Embodied Suffering to Production of Togetherness

ABSTRACT Pain is deeply embedded in social life, yet it is frequently treated in the social sciences as a secondary, clinical, or private phenomenon delegated to medicine and psychology. This article challenges that assumption by arguing that pain becomes constitutive of social life through its mediation—the social processes of expression, recognition, framing, and circulation that translate first‐personal experience into collective concern. Therefore, what is constitutive of society is neither pain in its raw immediacy nor pain that happens to be shared, but pain as mediated. Distinguishing pain from suffering and social suffering and drawing on phenomenological, anthropological, and political‐theoretical resources, the article proceeds in four steps. It first shows that pain disrupts bodily transparency and renders visible what typically remains hidden. It then argues that pain acquires social reality through expression and recognition, which are not external additions but the conditions under which pain becomes a claim addressed to others. It next examines how mediated pain enters the public sphere through mourning, protest, testimony, commemoration, and digital circulation, where it is differentially recognized. Finally, it argues that mediated pain produces specific forms of togetherness while constitutively also producing exclusion.