Gender, normality and the post‐surgical body

Abstract

Body image and social identity are affected by the sudden and radical changes that occur with surgery for cancer. People who had major surgery from cancer and other serious medical conditions, resulting in profound physical changes to the body, provided personal accounts of their adjustment after surgery. I am concerned in this paper specifically with notions of ‘coping’, normality and relativity that individuals employ to adjust to embodied changes and to recast their experiences in a positive light. Both men and women speak of ‘coping’ to manage their initial responses of loss and grief, then seek to reinstate normalcy—the patterns of living and social relationships that were characteristic before surgery. Normalisation, in turn, helps them to ‘cope’ in the longer term. The meanings of coping and normalcy, however, are engendered, and gender specific scripts of the normal body, masculinity and femininity shape men's and women's adjustment post‐surgery rather differently.