By Nour Tormos | Staff Writer
Judith Butler talked extensively about gender as performance; Simone de Beauvoir wrote about how one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one. Our experiences in embodying femininity and masculinity are defined by the repetition of acts we are socialized into. Being a woman specifically is a more bitter performance: the clothes, emotions, and behaviors we exhibit are rooted in our oppression.
Pain is one of many emotions extensively shown by women. In Fleabag (2019), the character Belinda says “Women are born with pain built-in”. Belinda is not only showing that pain is a frequent and perpetual state among women both mentally (stereotypically being sensitive, always crying, getting heartbroken) and physically (menstruation, childbirth…), but she is also deeming it a necessary element of womanhood, something that molds your identity as a woman. Girls must bond over their physical anguish; you haven’t lived the true girl experience if you haven’t cried over a man…Leslie Jamison says in her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” (2014): “The moment we start talking about wounded women, we risk transforming their suffering from an aspect of the female experience into an element of the female constitution—perhaps its finest, frailest consummation”. The integration of pain as an indispensable trait into women’s identity turns the instance of showing pain into a performance. And performance really consumes the self as it requires an audience: someone is watching, absorbing, and reacting to those traits.
A woman in pain becomes a woman adored, not a woman believed. A woman in pain becomes eroticized as she is fulfilling her dictated role. We see that in pornography, films, old paintings (like “The Death of Cleopatra” by Guido Gagnacci or “Hecuba and Polyxena” by Eugene Delacroix)… The O of a mouth in pain becomes a sexual fantasy and a girl in anguish is not comforted, she is looked at and enjoyed. It seems as if taking that pain seriously and questioning its source would be a betrayal of a sacred womanhood defined by suffering; this belief has a lot of consequences for healthcare.
Gender bias affects women’s proper treatment, and their symptoms are attributed to psychological issues: “You are crazy”, “ it’s in your head”, “you’re just stressed”, and “You need to lose weight” are all comments women have received from doctors when complaining about genuine health issues. Doctors even often suggest therapists to female patients while suggesting medication to male patients (Wesolowicz et al., 2018). Women who go to the ER because of stomach pain are more likely to wait 33% more than men do (Chen et al.,2008). Intense period pain tends to be dismissed as normal although it could be PCOS or endometriosis, and the diagnosis can take years even if the patient has complained for a long time, due to lack of awareness and research (Braddock, 2023). The degree of insensitivity to women’s pain is so high that we are expected to work a 9-5 when intense hormonal changes are affecting us, and we are not offered paid period leave when the discomfort impedes our daily activities.
Women do undergo a lot of pain but that should not mean that they should also withstand it more. Gaslighting a woman into believing she is “exaggerating” her symptoms is the very proof that we see pain as a performance. Exaggeration is a dramatization occurring theatrically, an act requiring a public eye. Even parents often accuse daughters of faking pain and being spoiled, and they are usually less likely to take care of them than they are to take care of their sons, because they believe that girls are just being girls, constantly performing.
The simple act of admitting that you are in severe pain to a doctor is proof that the pain is interfering with your daily functions, and it loses its preconceived image as a pretty aspect of being a woman. This applies specifically to physical pain because it can be rationally justified but most importantly stopped (unlike mental pain which others attribute to “craziness” …). And it is that act of stopping the pain that threatens to destroy the normalization and aestheticization of female pain. Another problem is women themselves internalizing these messages and accepting that their pain is an act. This leads to not speaking up about their symptoms and rarely visiting doctors because they find comfort and a confirmation of their femininity in it.
Gender norms have infiltrated every aspect of our lives, even the way so-called neutral practitioners treat female patients. The lack of research and understanding of our health and reproductive system only perpetuates resource inaccessibility and contributes to our misogynistic understanding of female pain. The moment we separate pain from the female constitution and the moment we accept that our pain is not an accessory that comes with our identity is the moment pain takes its real ugly bloody form without fetishizing and medical gaslighting. “Pain that gets performed is still pain” (Jamison, 2014)
Links:
https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_Cagnacci#/media/File:Guido_Cagnacci_003.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Hecuba_and_Polyxena_LACMA_73.3.jpg%22
https://www.dovepress.com/the-roles-of-gender-and-profession-on-gender-role-expectations-of-pain-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-JPR
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2008.00100.x
https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/healthcare/2022/12/tears-misdiagnosis-hurting-endometriosis-pcos-sufferers
https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain