Teatro patográfico y salud de la mujer: del “sick tourism” al “withnessing” en The Year My Vagina Tried to Kill Me y Performing Endometriosis

Abstract

This article explores the concepts of “sick tourism” and “withnessing” in two pathographical plays —Amy Vreeke’s The Year My Vagina Tried to Kill Me (2016) and Verónica Rodríguez’s Performing Endometriosis (2022)— written and performed respectively by Vreeke and Rodríguez, both women with endometriosis. Endometriosis is a condition in which tissue similar to the endometrium (the inner lining of the womb) appears elsewhere in the body. This tissue behaves like menstruation (grows, bleeds and sheds), but unlike menstruation, it remains trapped inside. Methodologically, this article uses theatre and performance studies, gender studies with a feminist intersectional perspective and the critical medical humanities, with the aim of foregrounding the corporeal and ecological epistemologies suggested by these “pathographical performances” (Brodzinski 2016), that is, performances that focus on the lived experience of illness. First, it examines “the visual” as a common trait across theatre and illness and how the case studies selected appropriate the visual in a context in which the illness of the performers lacks visibility and in which they are not seen. Second, connecting those phenomena to the idea of the spectator, it suggests a shift from “sick tourism”, which refers to the idea of “visiting” illness, and in theatre’s case, perhaps, be witness to the performer’s pathological process, to “withnessing”, which conveys a corporeal organisation becoming in which vision is not the main relational axis. It concludes that these “withnessing” theatrical examples highlight the existence of a space in which illness knowledge is contributed to from bodies and with bodies.