The Representation of Female Pain in Medical Academic Discourse. The Case of Vulvar Pain and Vulvodynia

Health care professionals within the scientific community have long ignored or minimized vulvar pain, a condition estimated to affect one in ten people with a vulva. In recent years, this issue has received increased attention and is currently undergoing a process of pathologization, i.e., it is being officially recognized as a disease by medical institutions. The term “vulvodynia” has been introduced to label and confer pathological status to this chronic pain condition, although adequate categorization is still lacking. Drawing on theories of the collective understanding of illness, which view discursive constructions as tools for shaping societal perceptions of legitimacy and credibility in relation to health conditions, this paper argues that the invisibilization of vulvar pain and vulvodynia stems from the broader issue of devaluing women and their experiences. This study investigates the linguistic and discursive resources employed within scientific discourse to construct, frame, and (de)legitimize vulvodynia and vulvodynia patients in scholarly literature. A corpus-assisted approach is adopted to explore the evolving representations of vulvar pain and vulvodynia in medical discourse. An ad hoc dataset of scientific articles published in English over the past 25 years has been compiled and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, aiming to contribute to a deeper understanding of how language shapes the reality of invisible pathologies and may ultimately lead to discriminatory practices.