The view from here and there
objectivity and the rhetoric of breast cancer
pp. 211-226
Abstract
In 2007, I wrote an essay on breast-cancer narratives and their public function; in 2012, I wrote another essay on the same topic. In 2009, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. This chapter takes up the shift between essays in my authorial position: I did not, for example, slip, with my diagnosis, from objectivity to subjectivity. Moreover, just as personal illness narratives are not innocent of cultural values or simply subjective, so accounts of neutral-seeming experts about cancer are not free of ideology or politics or desire, and are not simply objective. This chapter uses rhetoric as a theoretical framework for approaching questions of objectivity both in research and in cancer discourse.
Publication details
Published in:
Padovani Flavia, Richardson Alan, Tsou Jonathan Y. (2015) Objectivity in science: new perspectives from science and technology studies. Dordrecht, Springer.
Pages: 211-226
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_11
Full citation:
Segal Judy Z. (2015) „The view from here and there: objectivity and the rhetoric of breast cancer“, In: F. Padovani, A. Richardson & J. Y. Tsou (eds.), Objectivity in science, Dordrecht, Springer, 211–226.