Remaking the Self: Trauma, Teachable Moments, and the Biopolitics of Cancer Survivorship
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
The three-model screen
all 1,000 screened works →1 of 3 models called this metaresearch. This work is contested: it sits on the field's empirical boundary, and whether it counts depends on which model you asked. It is one of the 51 works in the disagreement dossier.
Critical analysis of how the psychosocial oncology literature constructs 'teachable moments' and 'post-traumatic growth' in cancer survivorship; an STS/medical-anthropology study of biomedical knowledge and its concepts, though survivorship itself is also an object.
The article analyzes cancer-survivorship discourse and biopolitics, not research practice.
Biopolitical reading of cancer survivorship discourse; object is patienthood and clinical culture, not research practice.
Abstract
As numerous scholars have noted, cancer survivorship is often represented in popular discourse as providing an opportunity for a physical, emotional, and spiritual makeover. However, this idea that cancer enables the self to be remade on all levels is also increasingly evoked in the field of psychosocial oncology. Exploring cancer survivorship as a biopolitical phenomenon, I focus on two concepts that have become central to understandings of the disease: the "teachable moment" and "post-traumatic growth." Drawing primarily on representations of cancer survivorship in the clinical literature, I suggest that cancer is increasingly seen to present a unique opportunity to catalyze the patient's physical and psychological development. In this framework, the patient can no longer be relied upon to transform him or herself: this change must be externally driven, with clinicians taking advantage of the trauma that cancer entails to kick-start the patient into action. Broadening my analysis to the concepts of "trauma" and "development" writ large, I go on to suggest that survivorship discourse seems to partake of a larger and relatively recent meta-narrative about development-both individual and societal--and the positive opportunity that trauma is seen to present to stimulate reconstruction on a grand scale.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
The record
- Venue
- Culture Medicine and Psychiatry
- Topic
- Childhood Cancer Survivors' Quality of Life
- Field
- Medicine
- Canadian institutions
- University of British Columbia
- Funders
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- Keywords
- Teachable momentWritPsychosocialSurvivorship curveBiopowerCancer survivorshipNarrativeCancerPsychologyPsychotherapistSociologyMedicinePolitical scienceLawArt
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes