When Care Becomes Visible: Breast Cancer and the Gendered Burden of Responsibility

Abstract (English)

In this paper, I explore how women living with breast cancer in France experience and negotiate care responsibilities during illness. Drawing on qualitative data from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in oncology settings, I examine how cancer disrupts the everyday and reveals the often-invisible care work carried by women within families.

Contrary to the assumption that illness temporarily suspends caregiving roles, many women in our study continued to feel responsible for others while undergoing demanding treatments. Rather than receiving care, they often felt expected to “stay strong,” support loved ones emotionally, and keep managing household tasks, even while physically and emotionally exhausted. These deeply internalized responsibilities are shaped by powerful norms around femininity, self-sacrifice, and motherhood.

What emerges strongly from the narratives is not only the “double burden” of managing both illness and care work, but also how cancer served as a catalyst, or even a revelation, that brought these hidden dynamics to light. For some women, being ill triggered a moment of clarity: they began to see and question the uneven and often taken-for-granted distribution of care within their families. The disruption of daily life caused by cancer revealed how their caregiving roles had been shaped over time by silent, gendered expectations, and how care had steadily flowed outward from them, largely unnoticed and unacknowledged.

This paper argues that illness can act as a lens through which hidden moral and emotional responsibilities come into focus. It contributes to anthropological debates on care and responsibility by showing how vulnerability does not automatically reposition women as recipients of care, but instead exposes the structural and moral weight of being the one who cares, even in sickness.