‘Not that I want to be thought of as a hero’: Narrative analysis of performative masculinities and the experience of informal cancer caring

Resisting abortion stigma in situ: South African womxn's and healthcare providers' accounts of the pre-abortion counselling healthcare encounter

Abortion providers and pregnant people who undergo abortion potentially face significant stigma. Researchers have started to explore how womxn respond to abortion stigma, usually focusing on individual strategies in managing or reducing stigma effects. Drawing on narrative data from research conducted on womxn's and healthcare providers' experiences of the pre-abortion healthcare encounter in the South African public health sector, we highlight how stigma may be resisted in social ways within this context. Everyday chatter and informal social support amongst womxn in the waiting room provided a counterpoint for health service providers' ascription of shame to the womxn, and a sense of solidarity amongst the womxn. Health service providers narrated their decision to do abortion work through the socially affirming hero canonical narrative, and womxn described their counselling as helpful. These social and discursive practices resist the awfulisation of abortion and provide relief for the womxn and the healthcare providers in particular contexts.

Men, chronic illness and healthwork: accounts from male partners of women with endometriosis

Currently dominant in medical discourse, the concept of self-management sees the responsibility for health and illness shift from the state to the individual. However, while this emphasis on individual responsibility and management has burgeoned, the role and status of partners and other family members in the management of chronic illness remains under-theorised. While self-management privileges individual responsibility for the management of chronic illness, the role of partners remains unclear. This paper utilises data from a study of heterosexual couples' experiences of living with the chronic gynaecological condition endometriosis to explore how male partners engage in its day-to-day management. In all, 22 couples participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews with each partner interviewed separately (n = 44). Data were analysed thematically and dyadically, informed by an interpretivist relational approach. The paper utilises the concept of healthwork to describe the illness work, everyday life work, biographical work and emotion work men engaged in. The paper demonstrates how the conceptual value of healthwork is enhanced by incorporating an analysis of the emotional effort required in managing chronic illness. The paper illustrates the value of investigating the role of partners in managing chronic illness to provide a fuller account of the distributed and relational nature of healthwork.

'It's Always About the Eating Disorder': Finding the Person Through Recovery-Oriented Practice for Bulimia

Bulimia is an eating disorder characterised primarily by binging and 'inappropriate' compensatory behaviours, such as purging or excessive exercise. Many individuals with bulimia experience chronic disordered eating, dissatisfaction with treatment, and difficulty establishing a 'new life'. Recovery-oriented practice, which focuses holistically on the person and their own aspirations for treatment, has recently been advocated in the treatment of eating disorders in Australia and other countries. However, questions have been raised about how this practice might be integrated into existing treatment approaches. Taking a social constructionist approach and using a case study of one woman's account, together with literature on patients' treatment experiences, we examined recovery from bulimia. Three themes were identified: bulimia was constructed as 'consuming one's life', an experience protracted through treatment ('treatment and becoming the eating disorder'), which makes life 'beyond treatment and attempting to live without bulimia' challenging. Based on this analysis, we argue that recovery-oriented practice, while seemingly commensurate with patients' needs, may be challenged by long-standing meanings of mental illness and experience of bulimia specifically.

Meanings of abortion in context: accounts of abortion in the lives of women diagnosed with breast cancer

BACKGROUND

A breast cancer diagnosis and an abortion can each be pivotal moments in a woman's life. Research on abortion and breast cancer deals predominantly with women diagnosed during pregnancy who might be advised to have an abortion. The other-discredited but persistent-association is that abortions cause breast cancer. The aim here was to understand some of the ways in which women themselves might experience the convergence of abortion and breast cancer.

METHODS

Among 50 women recruited from the Australian Breast Cancer Family Study and interviewed in depth about what it meant to have a breast cancer diagnosis before the age of 41, five spontaneously told of having or contemplating an abortion. The transcripts of these five women were analysed to identify what abortion meant in the context of breast cancer, studying each woman's account as an individual "case" and interpreting it within narrative theory.

RESULTS

It was evident that each woman understood abortion as playing a different role in her life. One reported an abortion that she did not link to her cancer, the second was relieved not to have to abort a mid-treatment pregnancy, the third represented abortion as saving her life by making her cancer identifiable, the fourth grieved an abortion that had enabled her to begin chemotherapy, and the fifth believed that her cancer was caused by an earlier abortion.

CONCLUSIONS

The women's accounts illustrate the different meanings of abortion in women's lives, with concomitant need for diverse support, advice, and information.