How do anthropologists understand and analyse experiences of hereditary cancer? The primary approach to date is predominantly biosocial, with emphasis placed on the presence of a genetic mutation as the key mode of interpreting experiences of (pre) cancer and the social relationships organised around the prospect of cancerous becomings. The figure of the individual is foundational to these accounts: it is the individual who harbours, passes on and suffers for disease or its spectre through their genes. This approach I argue omits the body in key ways, as it and its cancerous potential is understood as a whole, bounded fleshy entity enclosed as ‘the individual body’. Such figuring sees individual bodies as linked to one another, in a network of cancerous connectivity, and thus maintains their discrete wholeness. In this presentation, I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork within the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer community in Australia and America. Using this research, I move beyond existing anthropological approaches to hereditary cancer by taking a view of the body that is congruous with how my informants experienced it -- not as a whole, discrete ‘individual’ entity, but as part of a fleshy relationality sustained by acts of caregiving and receiving. Rather than taking at-risk bodies as discrete individual entities that circulate and relate in networks with other discrete individual bodies, I offer up a partial, porous body that is at the core of the family. I will detail how parts of precancerous partial bodies are removed in service of continued participation in the familial body, a practice that requires a reconsideration of (primarily) women’s experiences of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer and challenges established and pervasive notions of the individual as an autonomous, bounded body.

S2 2016 Series Speakers

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Date            Speaker
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Jul 27          Jane Ferguson
Aug 3          Alison Witchard
Aug 10        Hans Baer
Aug 17        Avail
Aug 24        Debra McDougall
Fri Aug 26   Michael Hertzfeld
Aug 31         Avail
Sep 21         Avail
Oct 5            Avail
Oct 12          Bonnie McConnell
Oct 19          Francesca Merlan
Oct 26          Simone Dennis
Nov 2           Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen

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