Reimagining Care Practices and Women's Relationship to Health/care: The Work of Fédération Amazones Across the French Overseas Territories

Abstract: This article first identifies a fracture in practices of care at the intersection of two historical trajectories: the long-standing dispossession of women as agents within medical institutions, and the colonial legacy of silencing and disciplining colonized bodies, including in medical contexts. Taken together, these histories have produced structural inequities in access to care, prevention, and treatment across health trajectories in the French Outre-mer. Next, focusing on the work of the Fédération Amazones , a grouping of seven regional associations spanning the French overseas territories and hexagonal France, the article examines how women's voices and situated experiences are mobilized to assert the value of experiential knowledge in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, challenging persistent forms of medical invisibility in historically marginalized spaces.