Although breast cancer can happen to anyone with breast tissue, women bear the substantial weight of its calamities. These calamities come to women with breast cancer by way of early death, painful death, disabling treatment, disabling late effects of treatments, loss of partners, income, and capacity, but the calamities also come via the social morass of the disease—its class politics, gendered delimitations, and racialized distribution of death, its rotating scheme of confused instructions and brutal mystifications.
