Paper short abstract

Women’s cancer trajectories in Mayotte reveal disability and chronicity as unstable, negotiated categories. Moving through clinics and bureaucracies, women encounter shifting thresholds of diagnosis, deservingness, and care, in the context of postcolonial politics and an underfunded health system.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes women’s cancer trajectories in Mayotte to theorize disability and chronicity as unstable classificatory effects rather than fixed bodily states. Drawing on ethnographic research in clinical and bureaucratic settings, it tests the concept of “swirling thresholds” to examine how biomedical temporality, moral economies of deservingness, and postcolonial governance intersect to continually make and unmake categories of illness, disability, and care.

In Mayotte’s underfunded health system, cancer moves ambiguously between the registers of advanced or chronic condition and disabling impairment. Whether women’s conditions are rendered legible depends less on clinical indicators than on their navigation of administrative documentation and migration policies. Disability and chronicity thus emerge as relational achievements, produced through encounters with institutions that promise neutrality yet generate new polarizations between treatable and abandoned bodies.

The paper also argues that these categorical instabilities are politically productive processes that sustain what has been theorized as slow and structural violence. Anti-immigration policies and underfunded health infrastructures transform uncertainty and waiting into governing techniques, situating women in prolonged states of suspension. Rather than a simple opposition between disability and chronicity, the analysis foregrounds their mutual entanglement: chronicity becomes disabling through delay and neglect, while disability is repeatedly deferred through demands for future recovery.

By tracing the everyday life of categories across clinics and welfare offices, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on biopolitics, care, and polarization. It demonstrates how attention to classificatory instability opens critical space to reimagine disability and chronicity beyond fixed hierarchies of value.