Endometriosis and postdigital health practices

Abraham JM, Julia M. Abraham, Rajasekaran V
Medical humanities · 2026 · pp. medhum–2025 · doi:10.1136/medhum-2025-013341 · PMID:42503499 · W7168351321
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This study analyzes online narratives of women with endometriosis, revealing how digital platforms facilitate knowledge sharing, advocacy, and community building through multimodal and transmedial storytelling.

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Abstract

This paper aims to analyse selected online narratives of women with endometriosis who leverage the affordances of these platforms to share their lived experiences. Through discourse analysis, this study critically engages with the pictures, reels, captions and comments that appear on these online environments to scrutinise how they become spaces of co-creation, education, advocacy and empowerment. The paper borrows from Monika Pietrzak-Franger's concept of 'postdigital health practices' to look at how knowledge production and circulation occur in online environments, with special focus on Instagram, while further extending to briefly include podcasts, YouTube videos and independent websites. Following Franger's definition of 'postdigital', the paper investigates the integration of digital technologies into everyday practices, the digital as discursive and the dynamic power relations created through them. The researchers attempt to close read the online accounts of illness experiences shared by four women with endometriosis, Emma Maxwell, Raphaella, Rebekah and Amy Corfeli, to highlight the serialisation, multimodality and transmediality of the shared content and look at how various ways of articulation aid in better expressions of these experiences. The paper looks at how these individuals navigate their everyday lives, how they fight their insecurities and embrace their ill bodyminds. Systematic analysis of these data provides insights into how illness and health are represented, communicated and conceived. The findings suggest that these embodied expressions may function as informal digital advocacy and community-building. While the sample size precludes claims about systemic change, the analysis demonstrates the value of attending to serial, multimodal and transmedial forms of illness narration in endometriosis discourse. The paper proposes that such practices warrant further investigation as potential sites of experiential knowledge circulation and peer support.

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