Organizational Technologies of Embodiment: Gendered Identity Work in Post-Cancer Survivorship

Abstract

How do women rebuild femininity after cancer, and how do care organizations shape this reconstruction during survivorship? We address these questions via a qualitative case study of Institut Rafaël, a French integrative oncology center that provides programmed complementary practices such as yoga, music therapy, sex therapy, and onco-aesthetics. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and research on identity regulation and embodiment, we examine how organizational practices shape what post-cancer femininities become recognizable, legitimate, and sustainable in interaction. Empirically, the study draws on interviews with 21 women survivors, 5 interviews with healthcare professionals, and approximately 50 h of observation. We conceptualize these interventions as organizational technologies of embodiment (OTE): institutional practices that reconfigure sensation, appearance, and intimacy, making certain femininities interactionally recognizable while rendering others difficult to sustain. Our findings reveal a four-position patterned process—refusal, separation, transition, and incorporation—through which survivors renegotiate embodied femininity within a care-based identity workspace. We develop the concept of Care-Institutional Embodied Identity Work (C-EIW) to capture this relational process of re-sensing and reclaiming femininity in organizational settings that both nurture and regulate identity. The study advances gender and organization research by (1) showing how organizations materialize identity regulation and resistance through embodied, programmatically sequenced practices; (2) extending the identity workspace construct to survivorship care; and (3) theorizing how care-based repertoires of appearance, vitality, and disclosure boundaries may be mobilized in other institutional encounters beyond the clinic. We discuss implications for care providers, employers, and policymakers concerned with gendered inclusion, power, and survivorship.