Enactment, Entanglement, #Endometriosis: Feminist Technoscience and the Instagrammatic Illness Narrative

Amanda Greene argues that a critical feminist framework is well-situated to grapple with how “wounded storytelling” about endometriosis unfolds on visual social media without artificially unraveling the complex hybridities that define these narratives. Leveraging two major theories, enactment and entanglement, to examine accounts and posts clustered around #endometriosis on Instagram, Greene suggests that feminist technoscience can generatively shape health humanities research on dynamic digital cultures. Feminist technoscience and research on illness narratives have had surprisingly little overlap. Yet, as digital contexts increasingly demand alternative theoretical frames that live at the interface of human bodies and new technologies, this scholarly nexus can be an invaluable resource for the twenty-first-century health humanities. This chapter offers tools to grapple with specific stories and practices of storying on their own networked, knotted terms as opposed to constraining readings to those that emerged out of earlier work and different mediascapes. Feminist technoscience can push researchers to move past the idea of remediation as a key to social media narrative scholarship and offers important insights into the experiences of those posting about endometriosis on social media. Access this chapter Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout Purchases are for personal use only Similar content being viewed by others Notes - 1. The six articles testify to the richness of combining feminist technoscience, digital culture, and illness narratives. I hope to build on this corpus of work in a way that foregrounds potentially transferable methods and that emphasizes the visual multimodalities of Instagram. - 2. For a recent popular example see Norman, Ask Me About My Uterus (2018). - 3. See Wilson Psychosomatic (2004) for more on hysteria and conversion disorder. - 4. Remediation, forwarded by Bolter and Grusin (2000), refers to the ways in which new media adapt and reproduce the form and content of older media. - 5. I identified these accounts by examining a large dataset of posts tagged with #endometriosis, collected with the University of Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Initiative’s open-source hashtag explorer. From this preliminary corpus, several particularly rich, representative, and active accounts were identified to serve as exemplary cases. The owners of these accounts were contacted via email or Instagram Direct Message in order to request permission to analyze and reproduce their posts in this scholarship. - 6. - 7. - 8. - 9. For more on this campaign and the experience of crip time through Instagram enactments, see my chapter “Chronic Constellations” in the Routledge Handbook of Media and Health (2023). - 10. “Spoon theory” was developed by Christine Miserandino in a 2013 blog post as a way of explaining the challenges of everyday life with chronic illness and has been widely adopted online.

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Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding author Editor information Editors and Affiliations Rights and permissions Copyright information © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG About this chapter Cite this chapter Greene, A.K. (2023). Enactment, Entanglement, #Endometriosis: Feminist Technoscience and the Instagrammatic Illness Narrative. In: Cressman, J., DeTora, L., Ludlow, J., Martin Peterson, N. (eds) Envisioning Embodiment in the Health Humanities. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49807-7_5 Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49807-7_5 Published: Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49806-0 Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49807-7 eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)