Visualizing pain disparities: Using graphic medicine to promote resistance to medical ableism

OBJECTIVE: This research investigates the potential for graphic medicine to foster resistance to medical ableism among those with feminized pain (i.e., endometriosis). We unite community and health psychology and disability studies to explore readers' engagement with a chronic pain webcomic and resistance to medical ableism via the construction of social media pain worlds. METHOD: A qualitative case study of the graphic medicine webcomic Chronic Pain Is a Party was undertaken. A systematic thematic analysis of 28 comics and 209 reader comments was completed by multiple coders; several coders identified as disabled and experienced chronic pain. RESULTS: Three themes were constructed from the data. Readers' resistance to medical ableism was characterized by an ethic of care, reclaiming epistemic agency, and solidarity through shared experiences. Readers recognize that ways of knowing, loving, and surviving are an important but underaddressed strategy in a world hostile to access and interdependency. They counter epistemic injustice via care webs that value experiential knowledge and connect individual encounters with medicine to broader collective issues, enabling structural analysis. CONCLUSIONS: Digital graphic medicine communities, particularly social media pain worlds, hold the potential to facilitate a deeper intersectional understanding of feminized pain experiences and mobilize collective advocacy for greater health equity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).