Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives Browse Inside

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Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair

By Emilia Nielsen

© 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.

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Product Details

  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 184 pages
  • Dimensions: 5.9in x 0.8in x 9.1in
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SKU# SP005373

  • PUBLISHED JAN 2019

    From: $31.46

    Regular Price: $41.95

    ISBN 9781487504373
  • PUBLISHED DEC 2018

    From: $32.96

    Regular Price: $43.95

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Quick Overview

Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair explores politically insistent illness narratives.

Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair

By Emilia Nielsen

© 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.

Continue Reading Read Less

Product Details

  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 184 pages
  • Dimensions: 5.9in x 0.8in x 9.1in

  • 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 Chapters

    2 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 Counternarratives

    3 Angry Stories of Survivorship
    “Welcome to Cancerland”
    Feeling Angry
    Challenging Happiness
    Contesting Survivorship
    The Cancer Journals
    Ordinary Life
    Bad Patient

    4 Questioning Environmental Causation
    Chasing the Cancer Answer
    Cancer Killjoy
    The Problem with Personal Responsibility
    Crazy Sexy Cancer
    F**k Cancer

    5 Queering Breast Cancer
    “White Glasses”
    Doing Elegiac Politics
    The Summer of Her Baldness
    Living Elegiac Politics
    The L Word
    Gender / Cancer Rage

    6 The Power of Narrative Repair
    Revisiting Counternarratives
    Enacting Resistance
    Performing Patienthood
    Narrative Repair

    7 Postscript: Screening Pink Ribbons, Inc

    Acknowledgments
    References
    Index