Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair
© 2019
Engaging with discussions surrounding the culture of disease, Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives explores politically insistent narratives of illness. Resisting the optimism of pink ribbon culture, these stories use anger as a starting place to reframe cancer as a collective rather than an individual problem.
Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives discusses the ways emotion, gender, and sexuality, in relation to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, all become complicated, relational, and questioning. Providing theoretically informed close-readings of breast cancer narratives, this study explores how disruption functions both personally and politically. Highlighting a number of contributors in the field of health and gender studies including Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathlyn Conway, Audre Lorde, and Teva Harrison, this work takes into account documentary film, television, and social media as popular mediums used to explore stories of disease.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 184 pages
- Dimensions: 5.9in x 0.8in x 9.1in
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Reviews
"Emilia Nielsen explores graphic narrative, comics, and other media to critique breast cancer's cultural impact. Focusing on the performance of patienthood and survivorship in disruptive narratives, Emilia Nielsen clearly argues that personal narratives have the power to ‘shift the public discourse’ from its long tradition of mystifying the disease."
Jane E. Shultz, Professor, Department of English, Indiana University"Emilia Nielsen impressively draws on, and enters in dialogue with, a wide range of recent scholarship addressing illness narratives and challenging mainstream breast cancer culture. Nielsen shows how the study of disruptive breast cancer narratives requires attention to the performativity of patienthood and resistance as well as to the entanglement of emotion, gender, and sexuality."
Stella Bolaki, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent -
Author Information
Emilia Nielsen is Assistant Professor in the Health and Society program, Department of Social Science at York University. -
Table of contents
1 Shifting Public Perceptions of Breast Cancer
Stories of Breast Cancer
“The Angry Breast Cancer Survivors”
Narrative Inquiry in Interdisciplinary Health Research
Normative and Disruptive Stories
Description of Chapters2 Feminist Counternarratives
Sharing Our Stories
Breast Cancer Narratives in Public
Feminist Narrative Bioethics, Illness Narratives, and the Medical Humanities
Breast Cancer Narrative Ethics
The Power of Counternarratives3 Angry Stories of Survivorship
“Welcome to Cancerland”
Feeling Angry
Challenging Happiness
Contesting Survivorship
The Cancer Journals
Ordinary Life
Bad Patient4 Questioning Environmental Causation
Chasing the Cancer Answer
Cancer Killjoy
The Problem with Personal Responsibility
Crazy Sexy Cancer
F**k Cancer5 Queering Breast Cancer
“White Glasses”
Doing Elegiac Politics
The Summer of Her Baldness
Living Elegiac Politics
The L Word
Gender / Cancer Rage6 The Power of Narrative Repair
Revisiting Counternarratives
Enacting Resistance
Performing Patienthood
Narrative Repair7 Postscript: Screening Pink Ribbons, Inc
Acknowledgments
References
Index
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Subjects and Courses
