Hysterical talk? a discourse analysis of Greek women's accounts of their experience following hysterectomy with oophorectomy

Abstract

Women's experiences following hysterectomy have typically been understood from a medical perspective as a series of endocrinological, physiological and psychiatric symptoms which may require therapeutic intervention. Such an understanding is limited because it does not acknowledge that the experience is embedded within socio-cultural practices which have historically produced and sustained the female reproductive body. This article draws on feminist post-structuralist theory to examine the ways in which experience following hysterectomy is constituted in relation to patriarchal and medical discourses. It is based on the transcripts of interviews with 10 Greek women, all of whom had had hysterectomies accompanied by oophorectomies for benign conditions. Discourse analysis indicated that central to understanding the meaning(s) of hysterectomy is the cultural production and regulation of hysterectomy as an embodied experience separated from and alien to the self. More particularly, for some women the whole body is pathologized as uncontrollable; for others it is the absence of the uterus and ovaries themselves which denotes both absence of control and loss of femininity. Not all construals, however, were negative. For some, hysterectomy liberated the body from the mark of ‘other’ and, it is argued, offered a point of resistance to the patriarchal discourses which privilege women with reproductive capacity as complete and sexual.