ABSTRACT
This chapter explores cultural articulations of breast cancer risk in relation to the ethnographic context of India – specifically, the activities of breast cancer patient activist organizations. In the chapter, I examine constructions of risk at the intersection between perceptions of social change and modernization and preexisting notions of gender, which are being mobilized in novel ways within an emergent field of preventative medicine in urban India. Currently, there is minimal emphasis on the potential risk posed by the hereditary component of breast cancer within these activist groups. Therefore, the ensuing analysis considers this ‘absence’, or subordination, of BRCA-related knowledge in light of the activities and sense-making practices of patients and volunteers where conceiving and confronting ‘risk’ – as part of advocating breast cancer preventative health care practices – frames (and is framed by) appeals to temporalities of social change and modernity as they relate specifically to gendered livelihoods, health and the family. In this chapter, I situate these ethnographic particularities in relation to an increasingly globalizing arena of transnational genetic technologies in order to further re-frame and problematize BRCA-related knowledges and practices (see Gibbon et al. 2010).
