Gendered Health

This research draws on ongoing qualitative research examining women's lived experiences of gendered medical violence in Spain and Germany. Through phenomenological interviews with survivors of medical Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), the study explores how women narrate their encounters with healthcare systems following experiences of violence — and how these encounters constitute a second layer of harm. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice, the presentation analyses how women's accounts are systematically dismissed, minimised, or pathologised within medical settings. Women's testimonies reveal patterns of testimonial injustice, in which their credibility as knowers is deflated, and hermeneutical injustice, as the absence of adequate interpretive frameworks within medical institutions prevents their experiences from being properly understood or addressed. These dynamics are compounded by intersecting axes of gender, nationality, socioeconomic status, and legal recognition, producing differentiated forms of institutional vulnerability. The comparative Spain–Germany framework reveals both structural convergences and significant divergences in how healthcare systems (re)produce or mitigate these forms of epistemic and institutional violence. Preliminary findings suggest that while both contexts share a pattern of institutional dismissal, the specific mechanisms through which this operates differ substantially, shaped by distinct legal, cultural, and healthcare architectures. By centring women's own narratives, this study argues for a feminist Medical Humanities approach that does not merely analyse medical violence from a critical distance but attends to the phenomenological texture of how it is lived, narrated, and survived. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates within critical medical humanities on the relationship between knowledge, power, and institutional harm.

Background: In this presentation, I explore a new area of leaky body monitoring and management: at-home vaginal microbiome test kits.

Research question: How do people engaging with self-testing kits interact with notions of microbiological imaginaries, practice self-surveillance, and perform ‘DIY healthcare’?

Methods: In this presentation, I build on a medical sociology approach towards understanding gyn-ecologies: attending to the material, microbial, and gendered experiences (Ford et al. 2025). I conducted interviews with 34 people with recurrent thrush (including women and gender diverse individuals) and 25 healthcare professionals working in primary care and/or sexual health. I analysed these accounts thematically conversation with literature on ‘leaky bodies’.

Findings: I apply a critical and feminist-informed sociological analysis of such kits, exploring this technology as a new form of managing leaky bodies (Shildrick 1997), identifying and diagnosing ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966, Kristeva 1982), and reshaping our interactions with our microbiomes and multispecies ecologies (Haraway 2018). I explore the meanings, assumptions, and implications that underscore such testing options within (1) the context of a growing market of at-home diagnostics, (2) how people conceptualise and manage the vaginal microbiome ‘in’ and ‘as’ themselves, and (3) as part of a larger practice of ‘body work’ used to attend to “attractive,” “clean,” and “fresh” vulvas and vaginas (Crann et al. 2017, Jenkins et al. 2018).

My work (part of my Mildred Blaxter Fellowship) seeks to advance understandings of gendered health experiences, particularly how they are shaped by larger notions of leaky bodies, microbiological imaginaries, and ‘DIY healthcare’.

Receiving a diagnosis is a crucial moment in many illness experiences, providing both medical intelligibility and recognition of an individual’s need for care. For those living with endometriosis (“endo”) – a chronic condition in which tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus – this process is often prolonged and challenging. Symptoms are often dismissed or normalized, leading to significant delays in diagnosis. As a common gendered condition that remains underrecognized, underresearched, and undertreated, endometriosis has important feminist implications.

Drawing on interviews with 15 individuals diagnosed with endometriosis in Sweden, this paper conceptualizes their quest for diagnosis and treatment as a “struggle for recognition,” which I term endo politics. This perspective raises important questions about the role of identity in such struggles. Since endometriosis is a gendered condition and a feminist concern, does this mean that identity, specifically gender, is the object for which interviewees seek recognition? This question echoes longstanding debates on identity and recognition, notably a recent exchange between Judith Butler and Axel Honneth.

By engaging with this theoretical debate alongside the empirical accounts, the paper suggests that identity is not the primary object of recognition. Instead, identity acts as a barrier, obstructing recognition of patients’ needs and serving as a basis for group organization. This dynamic is illustrated through three key moments of political mobilization: developing a fighting spirit, becoming a “we,” and struggling to be included. Together, these moments demonstrate how identity both complicates and structures the struggle for recognition in the context of endometriosis.

Endometriosis offers a compelling case through which to examine how medical knowledge and care are shaped by entangled social, cultural, and clinical dimensions. Despite advances in biomedical understanding, the condition remains widely misdiagnosed and unevenly treated, reflecting enduring gendered assumptions embedded within medical practice.

Drawing on findings from my PhD research, this presentation explores how endometriosis is frequently framed as a “threat to fertility”, a framing that actively structures diagnostic and care pathways. Based on interviews with 25 participants, alongside an object-elicitation component, I show how clinical encounters, patient experiences, and broader discourses enact narratives that privilege reproductive capacity. While fertility concerns are meaningful for some, their dominance in biomedicine narrows the scope of endometriosis care.

Using the medical sociological concept of deviance, I introduce the notion of the “deviant womb” to examine how endometriosis-affected bodies are positioned as having disrupted or non-normative reproductive trajectories within medicine. This concept highlights how moral and cultural assumptions about reproduction are not external to healthcare but are actively enacted within clinical practice, shaping what forms of care become possible for endometriosis patients.

This study contributes to critical medical humanities by demonstrating how medical categories and care practices are co-constituted through social and material processes, and by offering a conceptual tool for interrogating the normative frameworks embedded within contemporary healthcare.