HEALTH SELF-MANAGEMENT AMONGST WOMEN WITH ENDOMETRIOSIS

Endometriosis is a chronic gynaecological condition. There is little scientific consensus about what causes the disease or how it should be treated. In the absence of medical certainty about the condition many women seek to manage it themselves. Through analysis of interviews with sufferers of this condition, I explore what women say about responsibilisation and health self-management. The compulsion for women to govern their own health/self/bodies is explained as part of a neoliberal philosophy of health which has become increasingly prominent in the West. Women embody the notion that they are responsible for caring for their own health but experience health selfmanagement as a physically and emotionally demanding practice that compounds the existing stresses of life with a chronic illness. In this environment of hyper selfregulation, I argue that health self-care has become a form of labour or work for women with endometriosis, as well as a social, moral and personal imperative. I propose an extension of Arlie Hochschild’s schema (1990) of the first and second shifts (paid and unpaid work, respectively), arguing that the performance of health self-care amongst late modern neoliberal subjects has become, in essence, a ‘third shift’.