The view from here and there

objectivity and the rhetoric of breast cancer

Judy Z. Segal

pp. 211-226

in: Flavia Padovani, Alan Richardson, Jonathan Y. Tsou (eds), Objectivity in science, Berlin, Springer, 2015

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.