(Love) I Loved Myself Back to Life: Theorizing the Poetics of Feminist Fury, Endometriosis, and Female Empowerment

This chapter explores the radical potential of feminist disability poetics to challenge medical gaslighting, self-silencing, and patriarchal control over the bodies of people with endometriosis. Through close analysis of contemporary endometriosis poetry, I argue that chronic pain is not only a medical condition but a sociopolitical condition, one that renders these individuals both hypervisible and unheard. Drawing from feminist disability theory, Foucauldian concepts of discipline and surveillance, and the dialectical framework of radical acceptance, the chapter traces how poetic expression moves through stages of psychic rupture, embodied rage, and ultimately self-love. The poetics of endometriosis reveal the psychic violence of internalized silence, the trauma of repeated medical dismissal, and the affective cost of being cast as the “good girl” or “difficult patient.” Within these texts, rage becomes a generative force and a form of feminist knowledge and resistance. By reclaiming voice through poetic language, speakers transmute pain into testimony, reclaim their bodies from biomedical control, and imagine survivable futures. Ultimately, this chapter positions endometriosis poetry as a site of insurgent truth-telling that holds contradictory truths of rage and tenderness, trauma and beauty, and silence and speech at once, mapping a pathway from suffering to self-possession. Access this chapter Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout Purchases are for personal use only Similar content being viewed by others Notes - 1. Please see Denial for more on the use of lobotomies and psychiatric coercion to treat dysmenorrhea during the mid-twentieth century.

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