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Paper short abstract

In Mayotte, women’s cancer trajectories reveal how care is rationed through poverty, borders, and bureaucracy. Underfunded hospitals and anti-immigration policies turn cancer into slow violence, where neglect is not accidental but structurally produced in a postcolonial health system.

Paper long abstract

This article examines women’s experiences of cancer care and neglect in Mayotte through the analytic lenses of slow violence, structural violence, and postcolonial biopolitics. Based on ethnographic interviews and observations within clinical and bureaucratic settings, it explores how cancer trajectories are shaped less by individual pathology than by historically produced public health policies and an underfunded health infrastructure, widespread poverty, and exclusionary anti-immigration policies. As a French overseas department, Mayotte occupies an ambivalent position within the Republic, where universalist ideals of care coexist with racialized and moralized regimes of access.

Women’s accounts reveal how diagnostic delays, fragmented treatment pathways, and everyday experiences of neglect accumulate over time, producing forms of suffering that are gradual, normalized, and often rendered invisible. Cancer emerges as a condition of prolonged waiting—waiting for referrals, medical evacuations, documentation, or institutional recognition—during which disease progression becomes more visible. Drawing on theories of care as a political and moral practice, the article shows how distinctions between deserving and undeserving patients are enacted through administrative procedures and clinical triage, disproportionately affecting women racialized as migrants, even when they have long-standing ties to the island.

By conceptualizing women’s cancer experiences as embedded in slow violence, this article argues that scarcity and neglect in Mayotte is not episodic or accidental but structurally produced within a postcolonial regime of care. Women’s bodies become sites where colonial histories, contemporary border politics, and misguided health policies converge, revealing the gendered and embodied consequences of enduring inequalities in access to life-sustaining care.