Radiant: understanding endometrial cancer, vaginal brachytherapy and motherhood through words and images

Abstract

This article results from an anthropological analysis based on the experience of a Portuguese woman during diagnosis and treatment of an endometrial adenocarcinoma. Her embodied knowledge and narrative will raise our awareness of a specific set of health issues experienced by women with gynaecological malignancies, showing how perceptions of illness, treatment, corporeity, sexuality, womanhood, motherhood and resistance are intertwined. Her illness and her three-year old son emerge as two opposing elements in her story, conveying the notion of resistance through motherhood, using this bond against the forms of violence and suffering engendered by cancer and its treatment. Methodologically, this analysis blends oral narrative, anthropology and creative scientific illustration, that is, ethnographic drawing and painting enhanced by the use of metaphor and imagination. This hybrid and collaborative exercise implied a balanced mixture of speech, text and image, grounded in the words of Lua, the interviewee. Conceptually, it understands creative visual practices as ontological, epistemological and performative resources, enlarging the way social science can understand and act in matters of health and illness. Lua agreed to tell her story, but she decided to remain anonymous under a pseudonym, not finding a social opening for a woman’s account of a diseased uterus and vaginal brachytherapy sessions. Responding to her unease, this illustrated analysis also intends to dismantle stereotypes entrenched in the ways we see and understand women, gynaecological malignancies and sexual organs, bringing into discussion a type of cancer that, although frequent, is absent from public discussion and collective imagery, being similarly disregarded by social science.