Recalibrating temporalities of risk: alcohol consumption and breast cancer risk for Australian women pre-midlife before and during COVID-19

Abstract

Experiences of time and risk during the COVID-19 pandemic were volatile; exacerbated by lockdowns resulting in working from home, social distancing and home schooling. This article explores embodied temporalities of risk before and during the pandemic in relation to alcohol consumption and breast cancer for a small, non-probability sample of Australian women pre-midlife (aged 25–44). Layered inferential analyses of our data, collected at four timepoints pre- and during- the COVID-19 pandemic, enabled an illumination of the horizons of risk in women’s lives (broadly construed) and the ways these were recalibrated during the pandemic to manage its gendered stressors. Findings from this longitudinal study suggest that future risks of breast cancer were often discounted or faded from view, as new risks with more immediate consequences emerged: including viral transmission and surviving the (gendered) emotional/relational labours of lockdown. The immediacy of alcohol’s effects, both positive and negative, stayed in view however for women and served as a source of reflection around ‘health’ and ‘wellbeing’, with psychosocial wellbeing elevated over physical health. Examining the multiple time-framings of risk which co-existed on the horizons for women in pre-midlife helped us to elucidate challenges to decreasing future breast cancer burden at population levels via alcohol reduction alone. These insights advance scholarship on how gendered temporalities of risk are reflexively embodied in daily life.