A Tale of Two Sorrows: Hurricane Katrina, Parenting Trouble, and the Politics of Suffering

This paper examines a set of intellectual and ethical dilemmas that stem from efforts to define and analyze suffering.  Drawing from two separate studies, one on the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the other on middle-class parents whose children have a wide array of problems, we highlight the gap between sociological and self-referential claims to suffering.  How do we conceptualize the experiences of people who appear to suffer but are reluctant to identify themselves as suffering?  Should studies of suffering include the experiences of privileged people whose hardships seem comparatively trivial?  By addressing these questions, we call attention to the politics of suffering and scholars’ participation in the construction of what constitutes “legitimate” distress.  We also consider what scholars might gain from comparing the lived experiences of seemingly disparate groups of “sufferers.”  We argue that when scholars do not pay attention to how people make sense of their own situations, they risk dehumanizing their participants.  Sociologists’ adoption of psychological and psychiatric vocabularies of suffering is particularly problematic in this regard.  In the end, we suggest that it is possible to conceive of suffering as part of the human condition and to embrace all forms of human distress, while at the same time making moral assertions about whose situations warrant political action.  However, doing so requires scholars to be explicitly reflexive about the political assumptions that underpin their research.