The rhythmic stroke of 20 paddles in unison jettisons a long, narrow boat across Biscayne Bay. Each paddler’s pull demonstrates not only her maximum effort but also a palpable release—purging the fear, vulnerability, and loneliness that surfaced during her battle with breast cancer.
Among the paddlers in the Save Our Sisters (SOS) dragon boat is Gema Pérez Sánchez, a University of Miami associate professor of Spanish who joined the SOS team in July 2023, five months after undergoing a double mastectomy for ductal carcinoma in situ.
In 2022 Pérez Sánchez had a routine mammogram at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of UHealth – University of Miami Health System, that revealed areas later confirmed with biopsy and MRI to be cancer. She credits her oncologist, Dr. Susan Kesmodel, for patiently explaining treatment options and guiding her toward an innovative surgical technique that was the optimal solution for her. Nevertheless, viewing the scars on her body for the first time was traumatic.
“At the moment I saw it, I broke down crying because I looked like Frankenstein,” Pérez Sánchez recalled. “That was one of those moments I had to deal with real body dysmorphia; you have a sense you don’t recognize your own body. And as someone who studies queer and trans culture and feminism, it has made me confront the disconnect between theory and practice.”
Born in Madrid, Spain, under the Francisco Franco dictatorship, Pérez Sánchez first set foot in the United States at the age of 4. Her family accompanied her father, a nuclear scientist who explored alternative energy for Spain, on a two-year assignment in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at a Manhattan Project laboratory.
“After that, I identified as American,” said Pérez Sánchez, who returned to the United States several times throughout her youth as part of a summer exchange program and for one year of high school. “My mother always says she has four children—three Spanish and one American.”
After high school, Pérez Sánchez worked as an administrative assistant and taught English in Spain to pay for an undergraduate music degree. But her career goal to be a flute professor shifted after meeting a Bucknell University professor who was recruiting native speakers in Spain to teach at Bucknell. While at Bucknell, she earned a master’s degree in English literature, then earned a Ph.D. in Romance studies from Cornell University, which was then an epicenter of the burgeoning field of queer studies.
A faculty member since 1999, Pérez Sánchez teaches in the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her first book, published in 2007, explores La Movida, a counterculture movement during Spain’s transition to democracy characterized by art, music, and new freedoms for LGBTQ people.
She is writing a second book, “Queer In/Visibilities: Literary and Visual Public Interventions in Twenty-First Century Spain,” that explores “artivism,” the use of literature, visual art, and other modes of expression to advocate for political change. Her research sheds light on how transnational conversations advance social freedoms around the world.
“If you focus only on queer theory in English, then you miss out tremendously because you are impoverished in your understanding of how people live and identify as LGBTQ individuals in different parts of the world,” said Pérez Sánchez.
Pérez Sánchez refers to these transnational conversations as “transnational networks of survival” because they spread information and strategies for gaining freedom around the world. In that sense, they are not unlike the network of survival Pérez Sánchez has found through the SOS team. In addition to the unwavering support of her wife, University of Miami English professor Pamela Hammons, the “SOSters” are helping her gain freedom from the grip that her cancer diagnosis placed on her physical and mental health.
“You hear some of the women on the team say they are stronger than they were before cancer,” Pérez Sánchez said. “This kind of activity makes you feel like you can control your body again. You make it do things that you didn’t think would be possible. It actually helps with recovery from the scars from surgery.”
The SOSters, whose members range from 40 to 85 years of age, train on the water twice a week for about two hours each day, plus their coach assigns them cross-training activities. According to team founder Kim Bonomo, there are some 400 breast cancer dragon boat teams around the world. Pérez Sánchez and the SOSters will travel to France in 2026 for the International Breast Cancer Paddlers’ Commission Dragon Boat Festival, a global competition held every three years.
“I didn’t realize how important they would become to me as a group of people that, first of all, takes me outside of myself,” Pérez Sánchez said. “In the team, you are not the cancer, you are not you—you just need to paddle.”
