ABSTRACT
Among the standard biomedical interventions available to treat cancer, surgery stands for the technique with highest curative potential. However, bowel surgery for eligible colorectal cancer patients creates important issues of bowel motility and faecal incontinence, who have to learn how to get acquainted with their modified bodies over time. A fundamental type of body modification occurs when a stoma is temporarily or permanently created. In this chapter, I unpack the socio-material practices that make up the body with stoma in order to complement academic perspectives than understand the challenge of faecal incontinence from the point of view of its effects on the individual’s self-image and integration into social dynamics. Drawing on three ethnographic cases, I offer a description of the practices through which the stoma is managed. I shed light on the preconditions of bowel control for people with stomas. By doing that, I complicate the concept of ‘adjustment’ widely used by clinical practitioners to assess the extent to which a person undergoing stoma formation is able to cope with the demands and consequences of the surgery.
