The incurable self: Negotiating social bonds and dis/connection with metastatic breast cancer.

As the culture of silence that once surrounded cancer has gradually given way to greater public awareness, normative visions of what cancer survivorship should entail have proliferated. These visions emphasise positivity and perseverance in pursuit of cure. While these visions provide comfort to many, for people with metastatic cancer, the emphasis on cure can undermine their sense of belonging to the broader collective of people living with cancer. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 Australian women living with metastatic breast cancer, we explore how incurable cancer inflects understandings of self and transforms interpersonal relationships. Extending ideas around biosociality and belonging, we explore the tenuousness of social bonds, revealing how (in)visibility, (in)authenticity and (in)validation circulate within the daily lives of women with metastatic breast cancer. We conceptualise accounts according to four social bonds: (1) threatened bonds where a relationship is strained by misunderstanding, (2) severed bonds where a relationship is ruptured due to misunderstanding, (3) attuned bonds whereby a relationship is based on shared identification and (4) flexible social bonds when a relationship is based on mutual understanding. More broadly, we illustrate the persistence of normative visions of cancer survivorship and their enduring effects on those whom such visions exclude.

Embodied sociotechnical imaginaries: how donor-conceived people imagine identity, family and reprodigital futures beyond regulation.

Sociological scholarship has begun to explore imaginaries of family and reproduction, yet less work has focused on the emerging social form of the donor family. In this article, we consider the embodied sociotechnical imaginaries of donor-conceived people, exploring their reflections, judgements, hopes, and predictions regarding donor conception. Combining reflexive thematic analysis of free-text survey responses from sperm donor-conceived (n = 90) and egg donor-conceived (n = 1) and data from semi-structured interviews with sperm donor-conceived people (n = 28), conceived in both clinical and non-clinical contexts in Australia, we analyse donor-conceived people's imaginings of family, identity, and the practice of donor conception in the digital age. Our analysis centres the donor-conceived body that imagines, and in doing so, highlights the entanglements of reproductive and digital technologies, and the humans and institutions that drive their uptake. We argue that leveraging the imaginative and political capacities of donor-conceived people is a productive approach that illuminates possible (re)directions of the assisted reproduction industry as well as illustrating potential policy futures.