(Bargaining) Cut Her Open: Endometriosis, Feminine Monstrosity, and the Televised Deformed Body

This chapter interrogates the portrayal of endometriosis in contemporary medical television dramas through the frameworks of feminist disability studies, monstrosity, and the aesthetics of deformity. Drawing on Barbara Creed’s theory of the “monstrous-feminine” and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the chapter explores how women with endometriosis are depicted as grotesque, hysterical, and dangerous: bodies to be dominated by male physicians and narratives of reproductive failure. Through detailed analyses of House and New Amsterdam, this chapter illustrates how endometriosis is cast not as a chronic pain condition, but as a psychological or monstrous threat that consumes women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood. These dramatizations reinforce harmful medical ideologies: that reproductive utility defines womanhood, that chronic pain is suspect, and that Black women in particular are expendable within medical systems. Integrating disability aesthetics (Siebers), medical humanities, and feminist film theory, the chapter contends that these portrayals reproduce a legacy of gynecological pathologization, transforming chronic illness into spectacle. Ultimately, the chapter argues that reclaiming narrative agency from these dehumanizing depictions is essential for disrupting the cultural frameworks that frame women with endometriosis as monstrous, untrustworthy, or disposable. In doing so, it advances a critique of how cultural media shape public and medical understandings of gynecological pain. Access this chapter Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout Purchases are for personal use only Similar content being viewed by others Notes - 1. It is important to note that this is not how endometriosis starts. Please see Denial and Anger for more background on the causes of the disease. - 2. Please see Denial and Anger for more information on Meigs. - 3. Please see Anger for more background on race and endometriosis.

Bacon, Francis. 2010. Essays or counsels, civil and moral. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. Betterton, Rosemarie. 2006. Promising monsters: Pregnant bodies, artistic subjectivity, and maternal imagination. Hypatia 21 (1): 80–100. Bourne, Randolph. 1977. The handicapped. In The radical will: Selected writings 1911–1918, ed. Olaf Hansen, 73–87. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chung, Jae E. 2014. Medical dramas and viewer perception of health: Testing cultivation effects. Human Communication Research 40 (3): 333–349. Clarke, Julie Joy. 2008. Doubly monstrous? Female and disabled. Essays in Philosophy 9 (1): 1–16. Cooper, Harriet. 2020. The fantasy of maternal autonomy and the disabled mother. Studies in the Maternal 13 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.296. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Davis, Lennard J. 2000. Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the discourse of disability in the eighteenth century. In “Defects”: Engendering the modern body, ed. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, 54–74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Deutsch, Helen. 2015. Deformity. In Keywords for disability studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, 52–54. New York: New York University Press. Dickie, Simon. 2011. Cruelty and laughter: Forgotten comic literature and the unsentimental eighteenth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elia, Fabrizio, et al. 2018. Drama of medical dramas. Postgraduate Medical Journal 94 (1114): 477. Foss, Katherine A. 2011. “When we make mistakes, people die!”: Constructions of responsibility for medical errors in televised medical dramas, 1994–2007. Communication Quarterly 59 (4): 484–506. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2002. Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA Journal 14 (3): 1–32. Gatrell, Caroline. 2011. Managing the maternal body: A comprehensive review and transdisciplinary analysis. International Journal of Management Reviews 13 (1): 97–112. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The powers of horror: An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2010. Hatred and forgiveness. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. Lund, Roger. 2005. Laughing at cripples: Ridicule, deformity and the argument from design. Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (1): 91–114. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative prosthesis: Disability and the dependencies of discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2001. Re-engaging the body: Disability studies and the resistance to embodiment. Public Culture 13:367–391. Moradi, Maryam, et al. 2014. Impact of endometriosis on women’s lives: A qualitative study. BMC Women’s Health 14 (123): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6874-14-123. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Nicholas, Paola, et al. 2022. Women and their uteruses: Symbolic vessels for prejudiced expectations. International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 15 (1): 49–70. Riad, S. 2007. Under the desk: On becoming a mother in the workplace. Culture and Organization 13 (3): 205–225. Rose, Jacqueline. 2018. Mothers: An essay on love and cruelty. London: Faber & Faber. Santos, Cristina. 2016. Unbecoming female monsters: Witches, vampires, and virgins. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Scherr, Cassandra. 2021. Human pain, monstrous pleasure: Black feminine monstrosity and its potential for Black pleasure through uses of the speculative. Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo. Siebers, Tobin. 2010. Disability aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stewart, Elizabeth A., Lynne T. Shuster, and Walter A. Rocca. 2012. Reassessing hysterectomy. Minnesota Medicine 95 (3): 36. Stryker, Susan. 1994. My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: Performing transgender rage. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–254. Thanem, T. 2011. The monstrous organization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. The Greater Good. 2009. House. Created by David Shore. Season 5, episode 14. Heel and Toe Films. This Be the Verse. 2021. New Amsterdam. Created by David Shulner. Season 4, episode 5. Mount Moriah. Tunc, Tanfer Emin. 2008. Female urinary incontinence and the construction of nineteenth-century stigmatized womanhood. Urology 71 (5): 767–770. Welter, Barbara. 1966. The cult of true womanhood: 1820–1860. American Quarterly 18 (2): 151–174. https://doi.org/10.2307/2711179. Williams, Simon J. 1998. Bodily dys-order: Desire, excess and the transgression of corporeal boundaries. Body & Society 4 (2): 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X98004002004. Young, Stella. 2014. I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much. TEDxSydney. https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_ very_much. Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding author Rights and permissions Copyright information © 2026 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG About this chapter Cite this chapter Rovito, M. (2026). (Bargaining) Cut Her Open: Endometriosis, Feminine Monstrosity, and the Televised Deformed Body. In: Cripping Endometriosis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-15681-5_4 Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-15681-5_4 Published: Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham Print ISBN: 978-3-032-15680-8 Online ISBN: 978-3-032-15681-5 eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)