Piper Sledge

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Scholarly Contributions

Chapters

• Sledge, P. (2023). Beauty, Breasts, and Meaning After Mastectomy. In Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Materiality. Bristol University Press.
• Sledge, P. (2019). Male breast cancer in the public imagination. In Oxford Handbook of Sociology of the Body and Embodiment. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190842475.013.16
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  Breast cancer in American culture is intrinsically tied to normative ideologies of femininity. Within the highly visible public discourse about breast cancer, men with the disease (both transgender and cisgender) remain nearly invisible. The very presence of breast cancer in men is unthinkable precisely because its presence challenges the association of femininity with breasts. In this chapter I explore the ways that male breast cancer emerges in public discourse in order to explore the ways in normative expectations of masculinity emerge as a narrative framework for bringing trans and cis men into the breast cancer conversation as well as the ways that masculinity is deployed differentially in representing breast cancer in these two groups of men.

Journals/Publications

• Sledge, P. (2019). From decision to incision: Ideologies of gender in surgical cancer care. Social Science and Medicine, 239. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112550
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  In this paper, I draw on the narratives of 57 individuals whose gender identities and decisions about their bodies trouble the medical protocols for breast and gynecological cancer care. I focus here on the decision-making process for three groups of elective surgeries: hysterectomy, prophylactic bilateral and contralateral mastectomy, and breast reconstruction. These elective surgeries illustrate places in medical interactions where patients and providers rely on frames of gender to determine whether a given surgery is an appropriate option for cancer prevention or care. These cases also explain how patient experiences of medical interactions are shaped by and thus reproduce ideologies of gender through the bodies of patients. While clinical practice and medical decisions are supposedly determined through the principles of evidence-based medicine and patient-centered care, I show that ideas about gender can actually supersede both medical evidence and patient desires for their bodies in the care of gynecological and breast cancers.