Sanmiguel, Lisa Michelle (Author)
From a career woman's disease of lifestyle to an environmental consequence of dioxin exposure, endometriosis has undergone a dramatic transformation since its initial classification as a uterine disorder in 1921. Fewer than 20 reports of endometrial tissue outside the uterus (the defining characteristic of endometriosis) appeared in medical journals prior to the 1920s. Today, however, endometriosis is estimated to affect 5 to 15 percent of women of childbearing age, or as many as 200 million women worldwide. The seemingly dramatic growth in endometriosis cases has led some commentators to describe the disease as an epidemic ignored in the 1990s. How did endometriosis, a disease that was once all but absent in medical (and popular) literature, come to assume a prominent role in reproductive science and the lives of millions of women? How and why has endometriosis become a contemporary epidemic? In my dissertation, I argue that changes in the incidence and cultural significance of endometriosis must be understood historically in relation to a complex web of interests, practices, and policies that have shaped knowledge about the disease. Endometriosis has been formed and re-formed in and through struggles over meaning involving diverse constituencies, including scientists, physicians, corporations, advocates, and/or women with the disease. Focusing on representations of endometriosis in biomedical, mass media, and advocacy texts since 1948 (the year in which the disease first appeared in popular literature), I trace social, cultural, and historical developments that have contributed to current ways of defining, representing, and understanding the disease. To explore the rise of the endometriosis epidemic, I offer a genealogical analysis of disease discourses that combines a close reading of a range of cultural texts with an analysis of cultural practices and institutions. I embrace a multi-theoretical perspective in my work, basing my analysis in feminist poststructuralist, feminist cultural studies, and social constructionist approaches to gender, the body, technology, and disease. My dissertation illuminates the vast array of meanings and definitions that have been attached to endometriosis in the last 50 years, emphasizing ways in which linguistic constructions have influenced the diagnosis, treatment, and/or lived experience of the disease.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 61 (2000): 18. UMI order no. 9955666.
Article
Rachel Louise Moran;
(2021)
A Women's Health Issue?: Framing Post-Abortion Syndrome in the 1980s
(/isis/citation/CBB930488513/)
Article
Jennifer Fraser;
(2021)
Seizing the Means of Reproduction? Canada, Cancer Screening, and the Colonial History of the Cytopipette
(/isis/citation/CBB836159819/)
Thesis
Loe, Meika E.;
(2002)
(De) constructing the Viagra phenomenon: Claims, markets, and the science of sex
(/isis/citation/CBB001562539/)
Article
Tanfer Emin Tunc;
(2022)
The Autobiography of a Neurasthene (1910): The Medical Counternarratives of Margaret Abigail Cleaves, MD
(/isis/citation/CBB737134786/)
Book
Deirdre Cooper Owens;
(2017)
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
(/isis/citation/CBB060006268/)
Book
Leslie J. Reagan;
(2022)
When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973, with a New Preface
(/isis/citation/CBB553430377/)
Book
Caron, Simone M.;
(2008)
Who Chooses? American Reproductive History since 1830
(/isis/citation/CBB000953167/)
Article
Karissa Haugeberg;
(2018)
Nursing and Hospital Abortions in the United States, 1967–1973
(/isis/citation/CBB277198782/)
Book
Reagan, Leslie J.;
(2010)
Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America
(/isis/citation/CBB001023264/)
Book
Hannah Dudley-Shotwell;
(2020)
Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare: The Feminist Self-Help Movement in America
(/isis/citation/CBB446855800/)
Thesis
Emily A. Seitz;
(2021)
Prescribing Pregnancy Loss: Women Physicians and the Changing Boundaries of Fetal Life in Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB308650357/)
Book
Rosen, Robyn L.;
(2003)
Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights: Reformers and the Politics of Maternal Welfare, 1917-1940
(/isis/citation/CBB000500167/)
Thesis
Freidenfelds, Lara;
(2003)
Materializing the Modern, Middle-Class Body: Menstruation in the Twentieth-Century United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001562322/)
Thesis
Halfmann, Drew T.;
(2001)
Interests in Contexts and Institutional Democracy: The Politics of Abortion Policy in Liberal Welfare States, 1950--2000
(/isis/citation/CBB001562377/)
Thesis
Urban, Kimberly A.;
(2002)
Anglo women's reproduction in nineteenth-century America: Three case studies of the Southwest, Midwest, and Northwest
(/isis/citation/CBB001562171/)
Thesis
Norman, Kathleen Lynne;
(2000)
“Biological living”: The redemption of women and America through healthy living, dress and eugenics
(/isis/citation/CBB001560835/)
Book
Miranda R. Waggoner;
(2017)
The Zero Trimester: Pre-Pregnancy Care and the Politics of Reproductive Risk
(/isis/citation/CBB589678157/)
Thesis
Sullivan, Michael Anne;
(2001)
Healing Bodies and Saving the Race: Women, Public Health, Eugenics, and Sexuality, 1890--1950
(/isis/citation/CBB001560602/)
Book
Schoen, Johanna;
(2005)
Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in PublicHealth and Welfare
(/isis/citation/CBB000720417/)
Book
Morgen, Sandra;
(2002)
Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969--1990
(/isis/citation/CBB000201899/)
Be the first to comment!