Vivências e discursos de mulheres mastectomizadas: Negociações e desaios do câncer de mama

Abstract

This article investigates the mastectomized women's experiences and discourses about breast cancer, and also their strategies of negociation about the disease's challenges. 11 sessions of a support group for these women, carried out in a public service, were analyzed. The sessions were analyzed using thematic analysis and the dialogism and polyphony notions, within an historical and cultural approach that showed the opposition between the scientific knowledge (medical verdict) and the popular knowledge (possibility of cure), also the social stigma of the disease and the feminine gender. The group offered the setting for different knowledge to be updated and conveyed, reflecting a joint construction of the ideas about cancer and giving new meanings to facing and living with the disease.