Abstract: This paper focuses on women’s bodily experience of breast cancer in the context of sociology of the body. Based on the indepth interviews of 14 Chinese women with breast cancer, we constructed a ‘deformed body’’ analytical framework to be distinguished from a widely used “diseasebased” one. For most of the women, breast cancer means mastectomy or removing an important part of the body that signifies the female gender. This type of bodily deformity challenges the normal female body. Therefore, breast cancer not only causes bodily pains but pertains to the definition of the normality and perfectness of a female body, and even that of the normality of being a female in the mainstream culture regarding the body. A “deformed body” framework has four aspects: bodily functioning and experience (pains and mobility constraints), bodily appearance (hair and breast losses), personal identity (the patient identity, the female identity, and the normal social identity), and interpersonal relationships (especially the intimate relationships). The narratives from this conceptual framework display how the females, while experiencing the breast cancer (especially after the mastectomy), face and manage their “deformed” bodies as defined by the medicine and society, and how to restore the “normality” of their bodies and intimate relationships. The body moves from the medical space to the social space. The four aspects of the sense of deformity, as well as the journey toward normality, show specific stage/phaselinked characteristics in the process of diagnosis, chemotherapy, and rehabilitations that are nevertheless intricately connected, reflecting the multidimensional and political nature of the body in everyday life.

Key words: breast cancer ,  , body , normality ,  , deformity,  , female gender