Tracing identities through interconnections: the biological body, intersubjective experiences and narratives of suffering

The 1987 radioactive disaster in Goiânia - a 'critical event' - revealed the formation of new identities in opposition to the notion of radioacidentados (radiation victims), a classification established by the system of nuclear expertise and defined exclusively by the person's absorption of high-level doses of radiation. In the search to give meaning to their illness and suffering, new social subjects have emerged and elaborated new interpretations concerning the materiality of contaminated bodies. In narrating their subjective experiences, they situate their identities as victims in relation to the embodied experience of the contaminated site and the attribution of new meanings to certain objects associated with the disaster itself and nuclear technology in general. The text focuses on this articulation between the biological body, narratives, memory, 'things' and the constitution of social identities. It provides a historical analysis, supported by a multivocal ethnography of the Cesium-137 disaster.