Simone Lavoie-Racine

Endometriosis is a common chronic illness affecting up to 10% of cisgender women in Quebec. Those living with this condition cope with a wide range of symptoms like pelvic pain, and digestive, urinary and fertility issues. Despite the omnipresence and seriousness of living with “endo”, it remains an elusive object in public health policies, healthcare services, and public discourse. This is particularly puzzling in Quebec; a province professing its commitment to liberal ideas of gender equality and raises questions about how nationalist projects are materially produced through bodily practices. In that context, I investigate the experiences and practices of people living with endometriosis, healthcare providers, and advocates to understand the mechanisms underlying that exclusion from social concerns in Quebec. More specifically, this project examines how people living with endometriosis come to understand their experiences and articulate relationships with institutions, collectivities, and themselves in the face of biomedical uncertainty. To answer these questions, I attend to sites where endometriosis is enacted—clinics, support groups, homes, labs—to investigate diagnosis categories as social ones, where gendered, heterosexual, and ableist scripts of belonging are actualized. This project offers opportunities to understand body politics and social reproduction as produced and enacted within, and beyond, biomedical categories