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Paper short abstract:

Through video material collected over ten years of cancer treatments, dance performances and creative embodied practices, this paper provides an example of how an autoethnographic phenomenological approach can be used to explore profound biopsychosocial and somatic transformations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers an account of a lived experience of cancer and how illness—as a disruptive event—enables philosophical reflection and the exploration of ‘other’ ways of being-in-the-world. According to the biomedical model of the body, the subject of the illness event is the pathology rather than the person diagnosed with the disease. In this view, a body-self becomes a ‘patient’ body-object that can be enrolled in a therapeutic protocol, investigated, assessed, and transformed. How cancer patients might incorporate the opposite dimensions of their body-self and their body-diseased-object? Based on my lived experience of becoming ‘chimera’, I address the concept of alterity through an embodied perspective. I drew upon phenomenological explorations of radical illness experience that provide insights into forms of embodiment that expand and enrich biomedical views of the body. Building on a phenomenological approach to illness (Carel, 2008, 2016), and a feminist post-humanist perspective (Haraway, 1990, 1991), I present a case in which an autoethnographic and phenomenological approach grounded on embodied knowledge (Spry, 2001; Denzin, 2014: Pini, 2022) may help revise dominant perspectives.

Through autoethnographic video material collected over ten years of cancer treatments, dance performances and creative embodied practices, I ask if an embodied ‘chimeric-thinking’ can be used to question established notions of alterity and reshape our relationship with ‘otherness’. By interrogating the kind of epistemology that can emerge from the incorporation of such radical complexity, I aim to provide an example of how an autoethnographic phenomenological approach can be used to explore profound biopsychosocial and somatic transformations.