Breast Cancer, Gender, and Body Experience – A Qualitative Study in Argentina on the Transit of the Illness, Femininity, and Sexuality at Stake

Abstract

The chapter examines the transit of women through breast cancer by investigating the transformations in lifestyles and social behaviors that the experience of illness inaugurates. From the perspective of gender studies, we investigate the political technologies that operate on corporeality and the cultural matrices from which we signify, live, and account for this transit. These are experiences that, far from being reduced to singular events, have social roots. In particular, we focus on how the experience of illness acts as a regulating device for the notions of femininity and sexuality in play. This is produced by a reconfiguration of the gaze for oneself and for others, especially when going through certain treatments implies that the illness is “manifested” or becomes “public.” With this aim in mind, we look at the different strategies that women adopt, as well as the vicissitudes and shared discomforts that occur in the face of the emergence of the diagnosis and the treatments. The results presented here are the result of research carried out in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA) in Argentina during the period 2015–2020, based on in-depth interviews with women between the ages of 25 and 75 who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.