Digital doulaship: online endometriosis communities and rhetorical pathways to care

ABSTRACT This article argues that online endometriosis communities constitute a form of digital doulaship, where community members create networked care webs that contest medical gaslighting and expand pathways to care. Through analysis of posts and comments from the Reddit community r/endo, this study demonstrates how individuals with endometriosis employ digital platforms to visualize otherwise inexpressible pain, broker access to healthcare resources, and affirm experiences of institutional dismissal. Unlike traditional doulaship’s dyadic relationships, digital doulaship operates through peer-to-peer, distributed networks that leverage platform affordances to create persistent communities of support. Drawing from disability justice scholarship on care webs and reproductive justice theories of advocacy, this research reveals how digital doulaship enables collective rhetorical labor that transforms private suffering into political representation. Rather than reinforcing fertility-focused medical frameworks, these communities actively resist reproductive framings of endometriosis, creating alternative rhetorical spaces where chronic pain is validated on its own terms. This analysis contributes to rhetorical scholarship by demonstrating how marginalized individuals craft meaningful advocacy practices within systems designed to silence their embodied experiences. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. 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Anglesey, “‘We’re All Struggling to be a Complete Person’: Listening to Rhetorical Constructions of Endometriosis,” in Interrogating Gendered Pathologies, ed. Erin A. Frost and Michelle F. Eble (Logan: Utah State University Press), 69. 10 Ibid., 69. 11 Amy Koerber, From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv14gp859. 12 Casey Ryan Kelly, “White Pain,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 209–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2021.1903537. 13 Sara Davis and Abby M. Dubisar, “Communicating Elective Sterilization: A Feminist Perspective,” Rhetoric of Health & Medicine 2, no. 1 (2019): 88–111, https://doi.org/10.5744/rhm.2019.1004; Elizabeth A. 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