Body experiences and visibilities at stake: the passage through treatments and social behav-iors from a gender perspective

LEILA MARTINA PASSERINO

Congreso; 4th World Congress on Breast Cancer and Womens Health; 2023

PULSUS and the Editors of Journal of Cancer & Metastasis Research & Journal of Clinical Oncology and Cancer Research

The work is part of an investigation developed from interviews with women who live or have passed breast cancer in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA) in Argentina during the period 2015-2019. We address some aspects that the experience of illness inaugurates with respect to lifestyles and social behaviors from a gender perspective that considers the political technologies that operate on corporeality and that in this process assume a preeminent place. In this way, we explore how cultural matrices participate, as a field of significance from which we give an account of the experience of breast cancer, how we live, how the body exists in the face of this transition from the testimony of the women interviewed. In particular, we focus on how the disease acts as a device for regulating notions of femininity and sexuality from the reconfiguration of the gaze for themselves and for others, when the passage through certain treatments calls for the disease to “manifest” , becomes "public". We address some strategies that women assume to process these vicissitudes and the aspects that generate discomfort during this step.