Halle Rachel Young

Nearly three out of four cisgender women have pain during vaginal intercourse at some time in their lives, prompting many to seek treatment for sexual pain. Preliminary research revealed that for some women who sought care for pain during sex, pain was provoked and made chronic by repeated therapeutic attempts to achieve penetration. Treating sexual pain, then, becomes aimed at accommodating penetrative sex rather than alleviating pain. This study ethnographically investigates this project of penetrative achievement among cisgendered women in the San Francisco Bay Area. This study builds on feminist anthropology that refuses to regard actions that align with normative power structures as simple signs of lost agency and oppression, interrogating practices and ideals of intimacy and gender inspire women to engage in interventions toward penetration. I consider agentive therapeutic action that is not aimed at alleviating pain but instead engenders its continuation, challenging existing theoretical formulations of pain. In doing so, this project asks, what does the capacity to be penetrated mean for gendered embodiment, and how does the existence of non-pleasurable pain during sex trouble current understandings of sexual encounters?