´It just keeps hurting´: Continuums of violence and their impact on cervical cancer mortality in Argentina

LUXARDO, N. Y BENNET L.

Cancer and the Politics of Care: Inequalities and Interventions in Global perspective

UCL Press

Lugar: London ; Año: 2023; p. 57 - 86

Focusing on cervical cancer, in this chapter we examine the structural and cultural drivers of health inequalities experienced in the everyday social worlds of persistently poor Argentinian women, and how these contribute to increased probability of cancer death. We focus on women who are marginalised within the health system, and who, as shown by statistics and prior qualitative studies, fail to screen or screen regularly/routinely for cervical cancer, delay attending hospitals and die as a result of advanced cancer (Luxardo and Manzelli 2017). Through situated ethnography we explain women’s disengagement with cancer prevention practices within the broad social, economic, cultural and political structures of Entra Rios province in Central Argentina. Our core argument is that socially and economically vulnerable women are consistently subject to racist and class violence in their daily lives, and rendered as other in the national imaginary, within the health system, as elsewhere. This results in their disengagement or inconsistent engagement with cancer prevention. We focus on women who live in informal settlements that have arisen around an open-pit garbage dump. In this locale, garbage trucks overturn collected waste from more affluent neighbourhoods; this waste provides livelihoods for those who are excluded from the formal economy. Within these neighbourhoods the air is stale and smokey from garbage being continually burnt, water is polluted and the streets are impossible to walk along when it rains. Housing is precarious and unsupported by city infrastructure. Subsequently, many informal settlements arise on the edge of rivers or streams surrounding the garbage dump to provide access to water, albeit unsafe for drinking. Homes are overcrowded and households are supported by whatever means available. Overcrowding and violence mean that women and their children are at times homeless and must sleep on the streets or in carparks. These communities were initially formed by migrants from small towns and cities, looking to the provincial capital for an exit from local financial crises. Most arrived in the city with few resources and no formal qualifications. In this chapter. we refer to both women and their communities at times as marginalised, including in reference to social, racial, class and economic marginalisation. We discuss how the overlapping froms violence women must negotiate are gendered, as are their acts of resistance. The ethnographic lens allows us to consider how cancer outcomes for women are shaped by their everyday and cumulative experiences of disadvantage and deprivation, and how these experiences are the product of structural inequalities.