Moments of Misalignment: In the Space and Rhythms of Cancer Rehabilitation

Abstract

Cancer rehabilitation in Denmark is publicly funded and framed as a universal and ongoing element of the cancer pathway, aimed at restoring everyday functionality after diagnosis. Yet participation remains uneven, particularly among citizens marked by social vulnerability. This article examines how such inequality unfolds in practice by focusing on moments of misalignments: situations where users’ bodies call attention to themselves by not aligning with the spatial orders of rehabilitation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two rehabilitation units, we explore how such misalignments become visible in small gestures of hesitation, partial participation, or strategic withdrawal. By tracing moments of misalignment, we show how spaces of rehabilitation are structured by normative expectations of movement, progress, and improvement, while also containing cracks where alternative bodily logics surface. Attention to misalignment, we argue, offers a new lens on health inequality: shifting attention from formal access to the question of which bodies, rhythms, and ways of being are recognized and sustained within contemporary healthcare.