Reconstructing female experiences of pain during sexual intercourse. A feminist cultural psychological approach to a so called sexual disorder

Abstract

Women who experience recurring pain during sexual intercourse usually face helpless medical practitioners and inappropriate medical care until they are finally – if ever – helped in an adequate way. Even scientific research dedicated to this alleged "sexual disorder” still faces a conundrum. Looking for an explanation, medical and psychological studies usually recite the lack of methodically controlled research on this "female sexual disorder” like a mantra. From a feminist cultural psychological point of view, however, it is also necessary to problematise the predominant scientific gaze on the female experience of pain during sexual intercourse. A critical analysis of current research, which explicitly aims at a "multidimensional” approach, shows that most studies reproduce the very dilemmas they want to overcome. Moreover, these studies have to be challenged in regard to their androcentric, ahistorical, and objectivistic bias. Starting from this methodological critique we propose a feminist cultural psychological, reconstructive approach and exemplify it with an analysis of a group discussion taken from a current research project.

Keywords

• Dyspareunia
• sexual disorder
• feminism
• cultural psychology
• qualitative social research
• methods
• methodology