The Enrolment of ‘Patients’: Visibility, Voice and Breast Cancer Activism

Abstract

This book starts by considering a group of persons who have traditionally been situated at the centre of analysis in medical anthropology, where attending to the embodied or narrative experience of a patient’s illness normally takes centre stage (Good 1993). However, as Landzelius and Dumit point out, the figure of the patient is currently ‘undergoing an accelerated process of change’ (2006). Responding to their calls for further ‘scrutiny’ and ‘problematisation’ of the very concept of patienthood this chapter examines the expectations and experiences of a particular group of women attending cancer genetic clinics for the first time.¹ It examines how the features of an increasingly prominent public health discourse about breast cancer and a growing breast cancer lobby become a resource for a kind of health activism and what is perceived as preventative health. It explores how, in the context of a referral to the cancer genetic clinic, the value of ‘awareness’ and the need for ‘visibility’ entail and sustain what might be seen as a form of anticipatory patienthood. This in turn has consequences for the way persons perceive the danger posed by genes and the scope of genetic knowledge or technologies associated with breast cancer.