‘All naked at the gyno’: Psychosocial approach to the gynaecological examination from digital media in a French context

Abstract

The gynaecological examination (GE) is a major public health issue, with bad experiences of this examination widely reported as a disincentive to cervical cancer screening. In France, a movement to denounce gynaecological and obstetrical violence is expressed through a massive publication of testimonies on social networks. Via a socio-representational approach and from a critical gender perspective, this article aims to explore how people use digital media to communicate about the GE, and to analyse the experiences related to the GE and the representation systems underlying them. Using an inductive strategy, a corpus of discussion from the Doctissimo forum, and testimonies and comments from the PayeTonGynéco Facebook pages and Tumblr was created and submitted to lexicographical analysis. Our results suggest that the GE is indicative of a broader social function. People seem to use digital media to cope with a form of social ignorance of women’s experience in gynaecology with a certain ambivalence regarding their liberating potential.