Risks, pleasures, and desires: attending to the sexual politics of gynaecological cancer patient activism

Book chapter, 2026

Building on ethnographic fieldwork with a Swedish gynaecological cancer patient organization, this chapter explores the sexual politics of gynaecological cancer patient activism. It shows how the patient organization, in and through its patient activism, enacts, strengthens, and marginalizes versions of “sex and sexuality” in gynaecological cancer care. Through analyses of the organization’s patient activism around HPV testing and “sex after cancer treatment,” respectively, it analyses and contrasts three versions of “sex and sexuality”: sex as risk, sex as pleasure, and sex as desire. It shows how gynaecological cancer patient activism can challenge dominant versions of sex as “risky” and “clinical” by providing alternatives that assume sexual desire and pleasure to be vital for people’s everyday lives.