Communications surrounding, or about colon cancer, and how linguistic agency and point of view impacts narrative force.
Agentic language impacts people’s perception of the severity of health threats
Perceived susceptibility to colon cancer is highest when agency is assigned to people, not cancer.
Ex: ‘I developed cancer’ vs. ‘Cancer developed in me’
Use of temporal agency language in health messages -> assigning temporal agency to death rather than dying person -> greater fear
Possible: messages in narrative forms can transport readers to narrative world regardless of POV
Super important as it plays into cancer patients and survivors’ storytelling- it doesn’t all have to be in first person POV as long as the narrative form is there
Reflections/questions:
Important implications of health communication strategy especially in public health campaigns, social media marketing by corporations, and patient-doctor communications and messaging.
Affirms narrative power of storytelling by cancer patients and survivors -> to the level of sentence + word choice
How can this study and further research address Jain’s criticism of health messaging and language surrounding survivorship in media and popular culture?
Time-bomb art work inspired by Grace Lombardo’s “Grancer” blog.
Intertwining community, art, and illness: Cancer, interpreted and made visible
Done during COVID-19 -> social networking effort by Twist Out Cancer -> program called Brushes With Cancer pairing patients with artists to capture cancer experiences
The program also address the fear, anguish, and isolation/loneliness of cancer
Juliet R. Harrison sent me an art object that made the darkness visible. She had gutted the book — cut into its cover, torn out most of its pages — and then sutured it back together with splints, paste, fragmented words and wire. Broken, hollowed and rebound, it concretized the evisceration I had tried to protest.
Susan Gubar, speaking about her cancer memoir being rendered into an art piece.
Reflections:
Experiences are turned into storytelling which are then made physical through art
Transformative capacity of multimedia portrayals
Having someone else interpret cancer patients’ stories through art can be therapeutic and illuminating -> the patient can see their own stories and experiences reflected through someone else’ eyes -> the artist, while an outsider to the cancer experience, can act as a mirror to the patient
Sarah Mills posing as Marilyn Monroe while spotlighting her stoma bag.
Stigma and shame/embarrassment following installment of stoma bag post-surgery
Stoma bag/ colostomy bag: pouch that fits over stoma and collects urine + feces to divert flow from bowel or bladder
Mills survived stage 3 cancer and wanted to embrace the outcome of the surgery fully, posing as iconic figures while keeping a spotlight for her stoma bag instead of hiding it
“There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Yes, it will change your body but it’s not anything that you can’t overcome.”
Colon cancer, compared to others, isn’t as talked about or present in media or the larger public conversations.
Indignity of symptoms, post-surgery outcomes viewed as embarrassing and awkward to mention
When thinking of cancer, people often think of breast, cervical and ovarian cancer and don’t think of cancers of lung, colon, prostate, liver or stomach- deem to be less common and harder to diagnose as intestinal disorders
Visibility as important in both medical sphere and non-medical sphere -> representation brings attention and consequently changes
Chaos narrative (anti-narrative, time without sequence, reflection but non-reflection)
Perhaps this is more of Anne Boyer’s approach in her The Undyingbook
Patients not only restore the experiential dimension
to illness and treatment, but also place the ill person
at the very centre of that experience.
Anne Hunsaker Hawkins (1999)
Cancer diagnosis as de-stabilizing/ de-humanizing, invasive
Importance of narratives to counter self- fragmentation -> producing identity and experience as the patient is experiencing it.
Reflections:
Illness portrayals (commonly seen in mental illness)-> inaccurate in media/ inauthentic -> reading these accounts create incongruence-> stereotypes and myths do not aid interactions between others and the patient -> stigma
Important questions:
“Does this text voice illness, fictional or not, in a way that creates agency and empowerment for the reader or does it advance the cliché that proximity to death creates profundity?”
“Does the voice actually advance an understanding of illness or simply present an emotional melodrama?”
Jarring contrast between lived experiences of youths with cancer vs. the story -> perpetuate illness myths -> usurping of patient voice
“I do not exist to be your tragedy. I do not exist for you to find special meaning in your life. I do not exist to teach people lessons or to give people feels.”
