Brian Johnson’s thesis explores the gendered and racialized aspects of pain as it is developed as a motif in Hanya Yanagahira’s 2015 novel, A Little Life. Tracking how the characters in the novel are described as enduring, experiencing, and living in pain in the context of a neoliberal ideology of over-work, Brian asks: what is pain doing for Yanigahara? Is this novel merely a form of “trauma porn”? Brian answers this question in the negative, showing us how pain operates as an excess of feeling in A Little Life; an affective overflowing that mark moments of rupture with a neoliberal ideology, rather than of conformity to its logics of exploitation.