A new normal?: women's experiences of biographical disruption and liminality following treatment for early stage breast cancer

Increasing numbers of women are surviving breast cancer, but little is known about the long-term implications of having survived a life-threatening illness and living with embodied reminders of its potential to return. Twenty-four women aged between 42 and 80 (median 1/4 51)who had been treated for early stage breast cancer in the UK between 6 months and 29 years previously, were recruited through local media and interviewed. Analysis of their narratives revealed challenges in the post-treatment period that were conceptualised as biographical disruption and liminality. Although no longer ill, an ongoing fear of recurrence combined with embodied changes prevented a return to ‘normal’ i.e. a pre-cancer state in terms of health status, identity and relationships. We argue that following the biographical disruption of breast cancer, a ‘new normal’ entails a continual renegotiation of identities, daily lives and futures as time passes and lives evolve

Crossing boundaries:bras, lingerie and rape myths in postcolonial urban middle-class India

With the processes of modernization, urbanization and the entry of women in the formal labour market in Indian metropolitan spaces, this paper examines how the modern middle-class woman’s sartorial choices become enmeshed in popular rape myths (false beliefs) that serve to blame her for the wearing of western clothing. The paper articulates the ways in which middle-class women’s social realities are shaped by historical, colonial and nationalist ideologies of modernization, constructed and mediated through moral codes of dressing. By drawing upon original and contemporary empirical narratives from the urban spaces of Delhi and Mumbai, we emphasise how everyday sartorial choices, in relation to particularly the bra and lingerie, can reveal the nuanced ways in which Urban Indian Professional Women (UIPW) seek to understand, negotiate, and resist patriarchal power. Our findings shed light on conflicting and contradictory spatial experiences, where some women internalize and negotiate moral codes of dressing, out of fear, and others who transgress are subject to sanctions. Given the paucity of scholarly literature in this area, the paper makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution with its focus on postcoloniality and everyday discursive material spaces of gendered and sexualized dress practices. It argues for the consciousness raising of everyday urban geographies of dress that reveal complicated structures of power that are often deemed hidden

The everyday life of the revolution: gender, violence and memory

The ‘heroic life’ or the life of the revolutionary is one that resists or even seeks to transcend the everyday and the ordinary. The ‘banal’ vulnerabilities of everyday life, however, continue to constitute the unseen, often unspoken background of such a heroic life. This article turns to women’s memories of everyday life spent ‘underground’ in the context of the late 1960s radical left Naxalbari movement of Bengal. Drawing upon recent published memoirs and my own field interviews with middle class female (and male) activists, I outline the ways in which revolutionary femininity was imagined and lived in the everyday life of this political movement. I focus, in particular, on the gendered and classed nature of political labour, the gendering of revolutionary space, and finally, the extent to which everyday life in the ‘underground’ was a site of vulnerability and powerlessness, especially for women. I also signal how these memories of interpersonal conflict and everyday violence tend to remain buried under a collective mythicisation of the ‘heroic life’

Remembering revolution : gender, violence and the production of identity in Naxalbari

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