Narrativas de mulheres diagnosticadas com câncer de mama no Instagram: um estudo exploratório

Abstract

This research tries to analyze, under the critical bias, how the narratives about the sickening of breast cancer are presented on the social network Instagram. The current socio-historical context, in which such narratives are inserted, called the Digital Era or Web Era, is deeply marked by the logic of consumption, evoking a performative and aesthetic effort, of a primordially imaginative nature, aiming at the adaptation to an imperative of happiness and personal overcoming. Immersed in such a context, social networks, among them Instagram, allow us to see how aesthetics occupies a prominent place in the current social and economic structure, revealing the facet of what Lipovetsky and Serroy called the society of the hyperspectacle, in which Homo Aestheticus, always in search of "appearance" to the detriment of "being", acts. Therefore, considering the absence, to the best of our knowledge, of researches that contemplate breast cancer narratives on Instagram, we believe that it is of great relevance studying the theme proposed here. We have analyzed publications of ten women diagnosed with breast cancer who reported on their illnesses on Instagram. The repertories and positions presented by them were problematized, seeking to understand the nature of these narratives in the current social context. As for specific purposes, we have analyzed the posts (composed of images, their respective captions and comments of Internet users) and the participants' Instagram bios - that is, the self-description of each one of them on that social network. This research was based on methodological analysis of the Thematic Content advocated by Laurence Bardin. Eighty-seven publications of the participants have been analyzed, from which, through the identification of similar repertoires, we verified the existence of a narrative pattern about the sickening of breast cancer on Instagram. We have grouped the publications, based on these similarities, into two main thematic areas: 1) Trajectory of treatment, revealing the clinical course of the patient, including publications about diagnosis, usual treatments (chemotherapy, radiotherapy, mastectomy) and remission of the disease; 2) Trajectory of the body, grouping publications in which the body of the cancer patient is highlighted, either through the corporal transformations coming from the treatment or by the care dedicated to health and beauty. After systematizing and analyzing the collected data, we identified that the participants tended to hide their suffering, narrating "happier" stories and personal overcoming, receiving the validation of Internet users, through comments that reinforced the stereotype of "warriors". We thus understand that Instagram promotes the dissemination of a discourse in which remains an imperative of happiness, so that participants, even under the adverse conditions coming from the disease, behave as aesthetic beings, performing, embellished and in make up, thus inserting themselves into the same consumerist logic guided by artist capitalism and reaffirming social norms of gender, maintaining the pattern of the heteronormative role. Finally, we observed, among the participants, the reproduction of the biomedical discourse with regard to the concept of health.