Cripping Endometriosis: Feminist Disability Histories and Reflections on Power Pain

Offering a unique lens through which we can re-examine broader issues of autonomy, authority, and agency within the healthcare system, it will appeal to scholars in gender studies, disability studies, medical humanities, feminist studies, and the history of gynecology, as well as women’s health advocates and healthcare practitioners. This book argues for reframing endometriosis as a chronic pain condition, rather than an infertility issue. Drawing from feminist theory, disability studies, historical and archival research, and personal, embodied knowledge of living with the disease, it analyzes the deeply rooted misogyny and racism of Western medicine’s research and treatment of endometriosis as a “career woman’s disease”—a framing which demonizes women’s reproductive choices and focuses on gender roles rather than their pain, experience, and agency. Offering a unique lens through which we can re-examine broader issues of autonomy, authority, and agency within the healthcare system, it will appeal to scholars in gender studies, disability studies, medical humanities, feminist studies, and the history of gynecology, as well as women’s health advocates and healthcare practitioners.