The meaning of cancer: illness, biography and social identity

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to understand the narrative reconstitution of self for people facing advanced cancer, especially when the bodily integrity of self is threatened by terminal illness, marking the self as discontinuous and fractured. We then go on to explore how legitimacy of certain forms of practical strategies and symbolic styles (cf. Bury 2001) might be central to restoration of self and identity, enabling people to'keep a narrative going'(cf. Giddens 1991) despite biographical discontinuities and disruptions. We also explain how claims to membership of an imagined moral community such as an ethnic group, often perceived as a well defined whole, might be fragile and rest on contested meanings and values underpinning illness narratives that are shaped by a complex interplay of biographical features of ethnicity, gender, age and socio-economic position. It is our contention that intersubjectivity of self, that cuts across ethnic, gender, age and class affiliations, is negotiated differently in relation to the uncertain and changing nature of the illness and treatment. Hence, both temporality and biographical context are central to how identities are threatened and/or maintained in the face of a life threatening illness. We take the example of advanced cancer since it brings into sharp relief the notion of self as discontinuous at various levels, and how continuity is forged through particular narratives informed by larger discourses and collective representations to sustain particular identities