“The bloodiness and horror of it”
Intertextuality in metaphorical accounts of endometriosis pain
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.
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
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