In a room painted pink, a television is mounted on a metal pole. The television projects wavy shapes in pink, red, white, and orange. Two black headphones are plugged into the television.
Anouk Verviers Cybernetic hands playing in the mud (a community of bodies hosting migrating cells), installation view, Galerie des arts visuels for Manif d’art, Québec, 2026.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

The Oxymoron of the Body

Jessica Ragazzini
117 – Crip Feature Adelaide Damoah Anouk Verviers Georgie Wileman
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Particularly insidious, endometriosis often eludes medical detection, as medicine continues to be guided by its own biases. Affecting somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of people born with a uterus, this chronic inflammatory disease is characterized by the presence of endometrial tissue outside the uterus, which can have an impact on various organs, cause infertility, and sometimes even reach the brain. Its clinical definition is inadequate because it does not pay any attention to the lived experience of people suffering from it. Endometriosis falls within a “gendered mill of ignorance”1 1 - Marion Coville, “L’endométriose, une fabrique genrée de l’ignorance : expérience corporelle, technologies médicales et savoirs expérientiels sur l’endométriose,” Communication et langages 214 (December 2022): 73 – 89, accessible online (our translation). that makes it socially invisible. This is due to the limitations of medical imaging, the stereotypes related to menstrual pain and gender, and the disqualification of experiential knowledge.

In this context, contemporary art opens a space in which the regimes of visibility of the affected bodies are reconfigured. Based on the art practices of Georgie Wileman, Anouk Verviers, and Adelaide Damoah, all three affected by endometriosis, I highlight the ways in which some contemporary artists use the oxymoron specific to this disease — the pain that is intensely felt in the body yet difficult to detect through medical imaging — as an aesthetic and political lever to challenge the dominant frameworks for recognizing suffering. Their works are a source of embodied knowledge and represent a crip approach to art without ever falling into the trap of aestheticizing endometriosis.

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This article also appears in the issue 117 - Crip
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