Glamorous Healing and ‘Rebellious Hope’: Tracing Grief in Transmedial Cancer Life Writing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates transmedial autobiographical writing practices by women ill with metastatic cancer. Their multi-platformed and mediated life writing normalises the writing about and commercialising of grief and dying. I draw examples from two popular cancer life writers: Canadian Nalie Agustin and British Dame Deborah James, who inscribed their lives and selves on digital platforms until death. I look for their performances and omissions of what I have named the grief of the dying; a particular form of grieving that impacts those living with incurable illness and a heightened sense of death’s nearness. Examining the limits and possibilities that transmedial life writing affords, I trace the transmutations of hope and healing in the autobiographical construction of metastatic cancer. Inscriptions of selves/lives take place in a transmedial network and are informed by the cultural landscapes of intersecting differences. I propose that a highly public life writing practice addressing illness and dying re-inscribes norms of acceptable ill selves and lives, while at the same time exposing illness cultures to critical examination. For the dying life writers, what I describe may ultimately be a hindrance – an ambivalent space when it comes to grieving.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".