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http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/koppel-living-with-cancer-you-dont-stop-living.html
Cancer afflicts about 1.5 million Americans every year with over 500,000 dying from the disease. Cancer (and its prevention) has become a common discourse that informs us about our bodies and how they can “betray” us. Discourses about cancer in popular culture have made ALL of us familiar with the disease being both common and deadly.
Yet what do these discourses tell us about cancer and how we are to understand it? What are the representations of cancer we see most often? What do these discourses tell us about our own bodies, and the realities of living with illness? Does popular culture teach us to “fear” cancer and illness?
The videos above highlight a variety of discourses about cancer, our fears of illness, how our culture should "respond" to illness, and even illuminates the links between discourses of happiness and discourses of illness. Don’t let cancer get the best of you, we are reminded. Prevent it before it happens, we are told. But can you “live life to its fullest” even when you have cancer?
In her book, “Ordinary Life: A Memior of Illness,” Kathyln Conway writes the following, "I resent reading glib, cute stories about cancer not being so bad, and I hate hearing that cancer made someone a better person. It's only making me a worse person”…People want to hear stories "of lessons learned, of cancer as a transformative experience."
Do dominant discourses about illness and how they “other” our bodies make more it likely that we will hear more positive stories about people “overcoming” the challenges of cancer instead of more negative stories about people suffering through it? Why/why not?
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