Entangled Bodies, Disrupted Selves - Un/learning and Becoming Through Diagnosis: Feminist Embodied Encounters with HPV-related Healthcare

Grounded in feminist theory, this master’s thesis research project draws inspiration from my own intimate, embodied healthcare experiences to explore the intersections of gender, health, illness, and healthcare, among other identities. Through an academic, poetic, and embodied narrative, this research project combines a lived, dialogical autoethnography and a qualitative, semi-structured, action-oriented interview, along with feminist intersectional, phenomenological, and posthumanist approaches. Situated within the context of Sardinia's HPV screening programs, this research project centres the intimate, embodied healthcare experiences of myself, the researcher, and a close friend of mine, the participant – both young, middle-class, cisgender, Sardinian women navigating a committed, romantic heterosexual relationship, the HPV screening program, and a diagnosis of mild to moderate HPV-related cervical dysplasia. Specifically, in this research project, I explore how our intimate, embodied healthcare experiences question, challenge, and disrupt the normative frameworks of the female body, while investigating how we negotiate our lived, concrete selves, bodies, identities, voices, emotions, relationships, and experiences and how we navigate their complex, dynamic, and hybrid interrelationships post-diagnosis.