**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.

**Keywords:** breast cancer, gender, femininity, sexuality, social behaviors

## **1. Introduction**

This production is part of a qualitative research developed in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA) in Argentina during the period 2015–2020, from the development of in-depth interviews with women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer, aged between 25 and 75 years. We have used the study of biographical forms [1–3] to analyze the experience of women from their narratives and through the technique of in-depth interviews.

We start from the assumption that the experience of women diagnosed with breast cancer is not merely an individual and private aspect, but is always the effect of social norms and ways of feeling. We question the biomedical nomination of the disease as a mere diagnosis, reduced to a sociodemographic or "biological" reference as an attribute or organic condition. In this direction and drawing on critical gender studies, mainly post-structuralism, we reflect on the processes of gendered subjectivation as a gendered and situated experience in specific ways of becoming ill [4–6]. Bodies live within the productive constraints of certain regulatory, gendered schemes that function as norms of intelligibility [7, 8]. We are therefore questioning how a disease whose clinical, epidemiological, and therapeutic aspects put social mandates weighing on women is perceived. Hence, the question revolves around the principles of social regulation of corporeality that are at stake in this experience and its derivations and implications, in the transformations and sensitivities it produces, where the materiality of bodies is inseparable from the norms that regulate their materialization and significance.

The chapter explores how the experience of illness acts as a regulatory 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 implying that the illness is "manifested" or becomes "public." With this aim in mind, we will examine the different strategies that women adopt, as well as the vicissitudes and shared discomforts that occur when faced with the emergence of the diagnosis and the treatments, particularly with regard to the transformations related to the visibility at stake and aspects related to sexuality. This approach focuses on the social networks involved in the experiences and thus differs from other studies, predominantly from the field of psychology, on sexuality and corporeality [9–13].
