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Article published In:
Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 11:1 (2021) ► pp.1–22

“The bloodiness and horror of it”

Intertextuality in metaphorical accounts of endometriosis pain

| Manchester Metropolitan University

In this work, I explore pain descriptions by women who live with the life-altering gynaecological disease of endometriosis. This condition causes incapacitating pain, which tends to be dismissed and normalised as part of the female condition (Cumberbatch, 2019). My aim is to explore the general patterns of pain conceptualisation by women with endometriosis and outline how an in-depth examination of salient elements of narrative scenarios may contribute towards providing a comprehensive understanding of the pain experience. I first examine patterns of metaphorical pain collocates from a corpus generated from online forum contributions. Following this, I explore metaphorical scenarios of pain, focusing on stories that reference popular texts or genres from a conceptual integration perspective. I argue that the combination of metaphor analysis of naturally-occurring data and conceptual intertextuality and interdiscursivity analysis in the metaphorical scenarios of elicited data constitute a methodological niche that allows a holistic assessment of the pain that can potentially be used in consultations and may help tackle the alarming diagnosis delay of endometriosis, which is currently 7.5 years.

Keywords: endometriosis, pain, intertextuality, blending, metaphor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Endometriosis
  • 3.Pain and metaphor
    • 3.1Conceptual blending theory
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Pain collocates
    • 5.2Accounts of pain
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.19002.bul
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