Trans epistemologies of adeno and endo pain: a history of perspective in gynaecology

This is a creative-critical essay about the shape of menstrual pain set against 'the politics of the uterus' (Paul B Preciado), drawing from personal experiences of adenomyosis. The premise thinks through existing literature and cultural poetics around adenomyosis and endometriosis, moving to analyse the effacement of trans and queer people from this thinking. The premise then sets the stylistics for an essay interrogating the use of dispositif perspectif or dispositif d'énonciation (a performative enunciation) in Robert Thom's famous 1952 painting of J Marion Sims. Incidentally, Thom exploded the vanishing point by failing to converge the lines of this painting. The essay draws its central enquiry from this failed vanishing point: what has gynaecology to do with being as truth, with congealed performativity, and what Sylvia Wynter terms the genre of being human? The stylistics of the essay are in step with this critical enquiry. The essay moves between poetry and prose, thinks with a reader toward and through theory and is composed as a heteroglossia rather than a linear narrative producing one singular or fixed idea.