Abstract
Little scholarship outside of medical science examines endometriosis, and there are surprisingly few feminist analyses of endometriosis as a cultural construction. Building on the handful of recent feminist cultural analyses of this gynecological condition that is routinely called an enigma, riddle, or mystery by clinicians, researchers, and patients alike, in this article, I map the origins, symptoms, and treatments of endometriosis using feminist body studies, the study of the body as a cultural construction that is gendered, raced, classed, and sexed, as a lens. Drawing on the body of interdisciplinary scholarship about the enigmatic late nineteenth-century diagnosis of hysteria known as hysteria studies, I argue that from its inception in 1921 to representations in self-help literature as recently as 2011, endometriosis has taken up a diagnostic and cultural location once occupied by hysteria: each disease pathologizes not only certain physical symptoms, but also social and cultural deviations from female gender norms. Although I investigate the relationship between endometriosis and hysteria, I go beyond merely claiming that hysteria morphed into endometriosis. Rather, I argue that a specter of hysteria’s wandering womb haunts medical and self-help literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, reinforcing traditional 55 gender and social roles, and at times, prescribing these roles as a cure for illness.