{"id":275768,"date":"2026-04-01T19:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T00:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/loxymore-de-la-chair\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T09:16:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T14:16:06","slug":"loxymore-de-la-chair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/loxymore-de-la-chair\/","title":{"rendered":"The Oxymoron of the Body"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u200a\u2014\u200athe pain that is intensely felt in the body yet difficult to detect through medical imaging\u200a\u2014\u200aas 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Medical literature now emphasizes the enduring disabling nature of endometriosis and the impact on quality of life for people suffering from it: intense pelvic pain, chronic fatigue, digestive problems, heavy menstrual bleeding, dyspareunia, anxiety, and depression. Many studies show that the disease shatters self-image and body image.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - See, in particular, Corrin Volker and Jacqueline Mills, \u201cEndometriosis and Body Image: Comparing People with and without Endometriosis and Exploring the Relationship with Pelvic Pain,\u201d Body Image<\/em> 43 (December 2022): 518\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200a22, accessible online; C. Sullivan-Myers et al., \u201cBody Image, Self-compassion, and Sexual Distress in Individuals Living with Endometriosis,\u201d Journal of Psychosomatic Research<\/em> 167 (April 2023): 1\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200a7, accessible online.<\/span> It undermines the modernist, profoundly ableist ideal of an autonomous and high-performing body-machine. In her photographs, the British artist Georgie Wileman presents bodies that call into question the advertising diktat of the \u201cflat stomach\u201d and considers people affected by endometriosis beyond gender and skin-colour stereotypes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"Lying
Georgie Wileman<\/strong>
This Is Endometriosis<\/em>, video stills, 2024.
Photos: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"A<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"A<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In the photographic series This Is <\/em>Endometriosis<\/em>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - The project continues to develop and currently also includes images submitted by volunteers affected by endometriosis and a film bearing the same title, This Is Endometriosis <\/em>(2024).<\/span> (ongoing since 2014), Wileman frontally frames abdomens marked by laparoscopic scars, purplish blotches and bruises, and sometimes covered with the dates of the interventions written with a pen or marker. She is interested in medical spaces, which, over the course of often futile hospitalizations, surgeries, and successive treatments, become strangely familiar to the patients as the pain gradually invades their whole bodies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\n

She treats the disease as a political condition that materializes in the bedroom, the bed, the examination room. These places are at odds with the neoliberal model, according to which the subject is always available, high-performing, and mobile.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The dates on the stomachs, the scars, the medical settings\u200a\u2014\u200aall these elements form real constellations and map out the disjointed time of a chronic condition. Endometriosis inflicts a discontinuous rhythm of crises, partial remissions, medical wait times, periods of convalescence, and the perpetual return of pain. The repetition of images builds a \u201cchoir of scars\u201d that circumvents patients\u2019 isolation by relating their different experiences. The stomach, the corporeal site socially associated with reproduction, gentleness, and intimacy, becomes an unstable and hostile space wracked by pain that flares up without warning and so severely that it alters the perception of oneself, space, desire, and relationships with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Whereas Wileman positions herself on the side of documentary testimony and the harsh truth of the medicalized body, Anouk Verviers uses fiction to explore the impact of endometriosis. She examines the disease across thousands of years as a long history of gynecological pain and of extractive capitalism, which treats bodies as exhaustible resources. Verviers grants agency to people living with illness, a capacity to act with<\/em> the pain rather than against<\/em> it, a capacity to invent alliances with other bodies and environments. In Cybernetic hands playing in the mud (a community of bodies hosting migrating cells)<\/em> (2023), focusing on the history of endometriosis and its treatment, as well as the resulting solidarity and sisterhood, she portrays people constructing and deconstructing a cob column with slow, repetitive, and collaborative movements. The moist, fragile, and sticky soil fissures, subsides, falls apart as hands continue to shape it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"Against
Anouk Verviers<\/strong>
Cybernetic hands playing in the mud (a community of bodies hosting migrating cells)<\/em>, video still, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The feminist science fiction video work The world was always full of us<\/em> (2025) features a cyborg body from a future community struggling with an apparatus that is supposed to heal patients affected by endometriosis but instead produces violent treatments. The figure of the cyborg, inherited from Donna Haraway and Alison Kafer, is used to represent hybrid people or entities caught in a web of medication, surgical devices, self-organized care, and feminist struggles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"A
Anouk Verviers<\/strong>
The world was always full of us<\/em>, videos stills, 2025.
Photos: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"Video<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"In<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The cyborg moves through a mineral, prison, or hospital environment, a metaphor for the medical treatments and forms of exploitation and control exerted on bodies with a uterus as a result of endometriosis itself, social programs, and medical devices. As the main narrator in the work, Verviers also gives a voice to several people affected by endometriosis, myself included. Together, the voices embody a ritualized litany of pain. Through science fiction and imagination, Verviers explores the dreams, hopes, nightmares, and fears that punctuate the condition. Her work encourages us to get away from the pathology\/normality binary and consider disease as a unique way of inhabiting the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Afro-descendant artist Adelaide Damoah examines the links between endometriosis and the issues of colonial history. Her relationship with the disease is deeply ambivalent, as it proves to be constructive and foundational at an existential and artistic level yet debilitating at a personal level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"Against
Adelaide Damoah<\/strong>
It\u2019s 3am and one of the most intense, spiritual, divinely feminine, creative, sexual experiences just happened in my brain while I slept off the pain<\/em>,
153 \u00d7 102 cm, from the series Radical Joy<\/em>, 2021.
\u00a9 Adelaide Damoah, DACS Images \/ CARCC, Ottawa, 2026.
Photo: David Owens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n


In the Radical Joy<\/em> (2021) series, her red-and-gold or mauve-and-pink body prints appear out of the darkness in bursts of colour. The body seems to emerge from a dream as much as from the materiality of the flesh. Damoah is both present and absent in the reproduction of a fragmented body, in which the complex connections with disease perpetually elude representation. This project is also deeply political because in many medical systems, Afro-descendant people affected by endometriosis often experience specific forms of vulnerability inherited from the long colonial and patriarchal history of healthcare. Initially working in the pharmaceutical industry, over time Damoah was forced to give up her career due to her pain, which was slow to be recognized and which compelled her to reassess how she relates to work and to her own body. In a neoliberal context, disability is valorized as long as it is converted into a narrative of resilience. Damoah\u2019s crip practice is directly opposed to this logic, refusing to transform pain into symbolic capital or a courageous driving force for overcoming challenges. She simply proposes to live with the condition, without any promise of healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their works, Wileman, Verviers, and Damoah demonstrate that suffering bodies are sources of legitimate knowledge. They bring crucial arguments to the public debate on physical and mental health and contribute to a better understanding of the reality of endometriosis. Public health policies focus on developing new treatments, which, unfortunately, is insufficient. Art reminds us that it is equally necessary to take care of ourselves and others and encourages us to recognize vulnerability, make space for the narrative of pain, and develop sites where we can rest from the injunctions of productivity and where suffering bodies can help each other. The aim of this care is to make it possible for lives to exist, both physically and symbolically, outside of the ableist framework. In this sense, such works are complementary to scientific studies because they emphasize the dilated time of pain, the anger, occasional relief, solidarity, circumvention strategies, and fictions we tell ourselves in order to live with the uncertainty of a disease that might never be healed. They reveal what medical questionnaires about the quality of life cannot show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Going beyond medical issues, Wileman\u2019s documentary photography, Verviers\u2019s speculative fiction, and Damoah\u2019s performative painting shift the dominant frameworks of the recognition of pain and make perceptible the constitutive oxymoron of endometriosis, the pain that is intensely felt in the body yet difficult to grasp through biomedical devices and policies. Without ever fetishizing endometriosis, these artists shed light on the complexity of relationships with the sick body in multiple spheres of life, as much in an individual and collective history as in reality and the imagination.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - This article is in keeping with crip theoretical analyses and an epistemology of lived reality, in which knowledge comes out of individual and collective experience. The interpretation of the three artists\u2019 works is marked by my experience, affects, and particular history as a person living with endometriosis.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 \u201cgendered mill of [NOTE count=1]ignorance\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Marion Coville, \u201cL\u2019endom\u00e9triose, une fabrique genr\u00e9e de l\u2019ignorance : exp\u00e9rience corporelle, technologies m\u00e9dicales et savoirs exp\u00e9rientiels sur l\u2019endom\u00e9triose,\u201d Communication et langages<\/em> 214 (December 2022): 73\u200a\u2013\u200a89, accessible online (our translation).[\/REF] 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.<\/br><\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":275723,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[8014],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[6233],"artistes":[8052,7849,8106],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-275768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-117-crip","auteurs-jessica-ragazzini-en","artistes-adelaide-damoah-en","artistes-anouk-verviers-en","artistes-georgie-wileman-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275768"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275772,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275768\/revisions\/275772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=275768"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=275768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}