“You go back to zero”: embodied precarity, endo time and employment

Drawing on interview and diary data from twenty-one women in the UK, this paper focuses on how endometriosis, a long-term gynaecological condition, is lived and navigated alongside paid employment. It discusses the intersectional dynamics of gender, disability, race and ethnicity to explore how certain bodies are precarized across space and time by the rigid temporal organization of work. We advance existing discussions of precarity by showing how, in the absence of supportive interventions, the embodied precarity of a widely misunderstood and gendered condition with highly variable symptoms can paradoxically make precarious work more suitable because of its purported flexibility. But this creates a double bind of its own, given the well-documented insecurity and lack of clear employment rights which characterizes such work. Theoretically, we develop the concept of endo time as a nonnormative temporality located within crip time to highlight its radical divergence from normative ableist and androcentric time and neoliberal labour logic for those working with endometriosis. Endo time advances feminist theorizing of precarity by shedding additional light on bodies at and not at work, those which can and cannot work regularly and consistently; long-term gendered health conditions; and the discursive representation of women’s bodies as leaky, unpredictable and fragile.