ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way that two particular accounts of the epidemic taken from the field of medical research and advocacy perform the disease and the epidemic. In AIDS and the Body Politic, Cathy Waldby argued that the war on a virus or disease that is the subject of an epidemic is always a war on the people. The chapter considers how the binary logic that surfaces via research and advocacy is connected symbolically and materially to notions of war'. Actor network theory (ANT) is a complex and diverse body of work in which questions regarding binaries; agency and power have been explored in radical ways. Jacques Derrida argued that Western logic is dominated by and derived from a series of binary oppositions. In accounts from medical research and advocacy, endometriosis is performed as an emergent and distinctly modern epidemic in which nature/culture, human/nonhuman and modernity/tradition figure as being symbolically and literally at war with each other, respectively.
