Temporal Dilution: Chemotherapy, Capitalism, and the Making of Cancer Time in Colombia

ABSTRACT

Through the ethnographic case of a man undergoing chemotherapy for prostate cancer at a hospital in Colombia, this article examines how chemotherapy schedules make toxicity clinically manageable while imposing rhythms that many patients cannot sustain. It develops an analytic framework centered on three interrelated temporal dynamics: temporal dilution, through which oncology distributes toxicity across recurring treatment intervals; time density, as those intervals become saturated by travel, waiting, paperwork, caregiving, economic precarity, and bodily exhaustion; and temporal dissonance, the misalignment between these clinical and lived temporal orders. The article shows how bureaucratic reproduction and infrastructural interruption shift the labor and risks of synchronization onto patients and caregivers, making structural violence a routine feature of chemotherapy rather than an exceptional breakdown. Attending to this dissonance reveals how inequality is enacted through the organization of medical time itself.