Paper short abstract:

Based on a fieldwork in Istanbul and Aydın, this talk explores how the Turkish women with breast cancer embrace an Islamic perspective and life style in order to cope with uncertainties in their life during and after their medical treatment. It compares this tendency with other ways of spiritual empowerment among breast cancer patients and survivors.

Paper long abstract:

Turkish breast cancer patients experience major uncertainities during and after their medical treatment, in terms of their treatment's outcomes and its side-effects. According to their illness narratives, coping with those uncertainties often brings out the patients' transformation into a better, spritually and emotionally stronger person. In some cases, this includes becoming more religious in terms of evaluating the issues of life, illness and death and living their daily life in accord with Islamic principles, such as praying regularly, wearing a headscarf and going to Mecca for pilgrimage. Based on a one-year ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul and Aydın, a small, rather conservative city in the Aegean Region, this talk explores how women with breast cancer describe those transformations as a part of their survival strategies facing with breast cancer. How do those transformations influence their social identity and interactions? How do those women relate their transformations to the marginalization and stigmatization of cancer patients in Turkey? Which social and cultural dynamics lead to the formation of the narratives of spiritual empowerment or becoming (more) religious ? To what extent such narratives enable women to talk about their illness experiences in their own words and from their own perspective, while speaking about cancer in culturally and socially coded ways? Having a cross-cultural approach, this talks aims at providing answers to those questions, by comparing the Turkish women's narratives with similar transformation narratives of breast cancer patients from different societies, such as the U.S, European and Middle Eastern countries.