Reading Endometriosis in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Madeline Docherty’s Gender Theory

Endometriosis has historically been characterized by silence, stigma, and limited public awareness, yet in recent years, the condition has increasingly appeared in contemporary fiction. This paper examines how literary representations of endometriosis contribute to the production of knowledge about the illness, focusing on Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Madeline Docherty’s Gender Theory. Both novels belong to the popular sad girl literary tradition and are therefore particularly significant sites for examining how endometriosis is represented in widely read contemporary fiction. Adopting a medical humanities perspective, the paper reads these novels in dialogue with scholarship on endometriosis, illuminating experiential dimensions of the condition that are often difficult to capture through biomedical discourse alone. The analysis engages with the concept of menstrual etiquette and largely focuses on the social and epistemic injustices experienced by protagonists living with a stigmatized, gendered illness. Rather than treating literature as a reflection of medical knowledge, the article argues that fiction functions as a mode of inquiry, generating valuable insights into the embodied, emotional, and social realities of living with endometriosis. By bringing these experiences into mainstream fiction, the novels not only deepen understandings of endometriosis within the medical humanities but also contribute to broader public awareness of one of the world’s most common yet persistently overlooked diseases.