The New Breast Cancer (Im)patient: Female Revolt against Biomedical Violence in US Drama

Abstract

Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, theorists from the fields of social psychology, anthropology, and the sociology of medicine, among others, worked to prove that health and illness are not purely physiological experiences, but also social ones, that are, moreover, highly pervaded by the construction and narratives of the different disorders known to contemporary medicine. Specialists like Arthur Kleinman, Peter Freund, Meredith McGuire, Alan Radley, or Bryan S. Turner have analyzed the cultural construction of the human body and its well-being or ill health, concluding in broad terms that, since the inception of modern medicine in the eighteenth century, we live in a growingly medicalized world, where scientists and doctors understand the body as a sum of parts that can be treated, fixed, or discarded independently from one another. In order to keep the whole in good shape, these authors suggest, the medical establishment has created and continues to improve techniques of analysis, surveillance, and monitoring, some of which, as was explained in the introduction to this volume, Michel Foucault analyzed in his classic The Birth of the Clinic as tools within a specific manifestation of domination that takes place in this type of specialized environment, that is, biopower.