Cancer Heroics: A Study of News Reports with Particular Reference to Gender

Abstract

Media portrayals of women with cancer emphasize women's emotionality in the face of life-threatening disease. For some sociological commentators, this weakens women in an exercise of patriarchal control by medicine and the media. The present study, of news reports of people with cancer in the media of several anglophone countries, compares portrayals of men and women. Media representations of the emotions of people with cancer are found to emphasize women's skills in the emotional labour of self-transformation, something which is particularly prevalent in reports of breast cancer activism. In men, cancer is more commonly portrayed as a test of pre-existing character. Both sexes, in these representations, are offered paths to the common goal of a self-willed victory over cancer and the limitations of the body. This media-orchestrated fantasy about human powers resonates with broader analyses of heroic projects of self-identity in late modernity, in which women's advertised expertise in the management of emotions plays an important part. The imagined superpowers of people with cancer also involve a denial of disappointment that parallels the supposed efficacy of prayer and religious observance in traditional societies.

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