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‘Women get this’: gendered meanings of chronic pelvic pain

Victoria M. Grace

University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Sara MacBride-Stewart

Cardiff University, UK

Chronic pelvic pain in women is a key site through which explorations of the meanings of female gender and pain might further insights into the broader question of the embodied experience of women in relation to pain. A biocultural approach is used to present an analysis of interviews with 40 New Zealand women in which they reflect on ‘how come’ they have chronic pelvic pain. Women consistently employ a mechanistic rendition of medical discourse and understandings in their constructions of ‘how come’ they have pain, accompanied by a reiteration of ‘not knowing’ and a normalizing of their pelvic pain. We explore how this normalizing works within the narratives to establish women's pelvic pain as intrinsically gendered. Etiological meanings that are constructed in medical terms and yet are unable to be interpreted within a dualist frame of normality and pathology, we argue, permeate and shape gendered experience of chronic pain conditions.

Key Words: chronic pelvic pain • meanings of pain • medicalization • normalization • women

Health:, Vol. 11, No. 1, 47-67 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1363459307070803
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