A qualitative study of endometriosis-related pain: Metaphorical expressions beyond physical damage

This paper examines the conceptualizations of endometriosis-related pain by combining Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) with a corpus-based approach. Endometriosis is a complex and multi-faceted condition, affecting one in ten people assigned female at birth and bearing serious consequences on one’s physical, social and psychological wellbeing. Especially in cases when the pain is invisible, communication resorts to violent metaphors implying harm, physical damage, or fight. These metaphors are thought to increase the likelihood of eliciting an empathetic response in the interlocutor. However, such narratives may be detrimental at the individual level (e.g., increasing pain catastrophizing) and at the community level (e.g., overshadowing the capacity of communities to construct and use metaphors in alternative ways). Therefore, this study presents an initial exploratory analysis of metaphorical source domains in descriptions of endometriosis-related pain written in online, freely accessible blogs. Metaphorical expressions were manually annotated in a sample of KWICs basing on the MIPVU procedure and thematically categorized. The adoption of a bottom-up and top-down approach within a qualitative framework allowed an empirically grounded analysis of candidate source domains, which calls for further quantitative testing.