Gender and Ontological Friction in Endometriosis Diagnosis

Annie James, Manjusha G. Warrier, Manoj Warrier, Neda Ansaari
In: Women's Reproductive Health · 2026 · vol. 13(2) , pp. 539–554 · doi:10.1080/23293691.2026.2629426 · W7133795820
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This paper examines how gender and ontological friction influence the diagnostic process for endometriosis among patients and healthcare providers.

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Abstract

Endometriosis often struggles to consolidate as a recognizable condition during biomedical encounters; in India, this unfolds at the interstice of biomedicine and gender-caste-class persistence. We contribute to contemporary endometriosis discourse by considering how, given the ontological politics of Indian women’s reproductive health care, symptoms move across porous configurations without consolidating as “disease.” Through reflexive thematic analysis, informed by feminist new materialism, of interviews with nine cisgender women in urban India, we trace “ontological friction” and its influence on patient care practices. We identify this friction as the condition through which diagnostic delay continually emerges.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge all participants for their time and support for this study. We also thank two graduate students who assisted with data collection, and a doctoral writing-in-progress seminar for critically expanding our understanding of ontology as it relates to gender-class-caste persistence. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Data Availability Statement Data not available due to ethical restrictions. Correction Statement This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. Notes 1 Ontological politics, which we define through STS scholar and philosopher Annemarie Mol, is “politics that has to do with the way in which problems are framed, bodies are shaped, and lives are pushed and pulled into one shape or another” (2002, viii). It draws on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, specifically on how the world is enacted through complex entanglements that include both human and non-human actors.

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endometriosis

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Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

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