A genética do câncer de mama e a pluripotência do gênero

AutorSahra Gibbon
Páginas137-157
Cad. de Pesq. Interd isc. em Ci-s. Hum-s. , Florianópolis, ISSN 1984-8951
v.15, n.107, p. 137-157, ago/dez 2014
138
sometimes been transformed in relation to the field of knowledge and technology
associated with the BRCA genes.
Keywords: Genetics. Gender. Health. Breast cancer. Identity.
The so-called genetic revolution, developments in the life sciences a nd the rise
of predictive medicine has stimulated social research not only to examine the novel
forms of health and identity brought about at these junctures, but has also more
recently involved efforts to examine how ‘older’ cultural categories of difference and
identity such as race and ethnicity might be given new life by the development of new
genetic knowledge and technologies (DUSTER, 1990; MONTOYA, 2007;
FULLWILEY, 2007). Gender must be regarded as an equally important category of
difference that is also being informed by developments in genomics. Yet while
questions of gender have been at the forefront of research examining the way that
women are subject to and recruited into new reproductive technologies and the way
that these techniques simultaneously naturalize and de-naturalize gender,
reproduction and the biological, the dynamics between genes and gender in relation
to predictive genomic interventions has received less attention (RAPP, 1999;
STRATHERN, 1992; FRANKLIN, ROBERTS, 2006). In this paper I will examine
these questions in relation to this particular area of genomic science and medicine by
focusing on a domain known commonly as ‘breast cancer genetics’. This emerging
and fast growing area of genomic medicine is linked to the discovery and application
of the knowledge and technologies associated with two inherited susceptibility genes
BRCA1 and BRCA2. These genes were identified in the mid -1990s, and are thought
to confer an increased risk of developing the disease and are thought to account for
between 5 and 10 percent of all breast cancers. Genetic testing and identification of
those at increased genetic risk of developing breast cancer, as a result of carrying a
mutated copy of one of these genes, have formed the basis of an expanding domain
of genetic medicine in the United Kingdom, Europe, United States, Canada and
elsewhere recruiting thou-sands of healthy but ‘at risk’ women (and smaller numbers

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