(Bargaining) Cut Her Open: Endometriosis, Feminine Monstrosity, and the Televised Deformed Body
摘要
This chapter interrogates the portrayal of endometriosis in contemporary medical television dramas through the frameworks of feminist disability studies, monstrosity, and the aesthetics of deformity. Drawing on Barbara Creed’s theory of the “monstrous-feminine” and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the chapter explores how women with endometriosis are depicted as grotesque, hysterical, and dangerous: bodies to be dominated by male physicians and narratives of reproductive failure. Through detailed analyses of House and New Amsterdam, this chapter illustrates how endometriosis is cast not as a chronic pain condition, but as a psychological or monstrous threat that consumes women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood. These dramatizations reinforce harmful medical ideologies: that reproductive utility defines womanhood, that chronic pain is suspect, and that Black women in particular are expendable within medical systems. Integrating disability aesthetics (Siebers), medical humanities, and feminist film theory, the chapter contends that these portrayals reproduce a legacy of gynecological pathologization, transforming chronic illness into spectacle. Ultimately, the chapter argues that reclaiming narrative agency from these dehumanizing depictions is essential for disrupting the cultural frameworks that frame women with endometriosis as monstrous, untrustworthy, or disposable. In doing so, it advances a critique of how cultural media shape public and medical understandings of gynecological pain.