Sporting cancer: struggle language in news reports of people with cancer

Seale, Clive

doi:10.1111/1467-9566.00254

Cited by 94 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Cancer metaphors, we would argue, continue to shape the experience of the illness, but the positive personal fight now dominates the cancer rhetoric. The heroism apparent in the description of cancer patients noted by Seale (Seale, 2001(Seale, , 2002 has become the norm in the cultural representation of cancer (Hanne & Hawken, 2007) and has influenced the way in which both patients and professionals react to a cancer diagnosis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Illness identity as an important component of candidacy: Contrasting experiences of help-seeking and access to care in cancer and heart disease

Macdonald

Blane

Browne

et al. 2016

Social Science & Medicine

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How and when we use health services or healthcare provision has dominated exploration of and debates around healthcare access. Levels of utilisation are assumed as a proxy for access. Yet, focusing on utilisation conceals an important aspect of the access conundrum: the relationships that patients and potential patients have with the healthcare system and the professionals within those systems. Candidacy has been proposed as an antidote to traditional utilisation models. The Candidacy construct offers the ability to include patient-professional aspects alongside utilisation and thus promotes a deeper understanding of access. Originally applied to healthcare access for vulnerable populations, additional socio-demographic factors, including age and ethnicity, have also been shown to influence the Candidacy process. Here we propose a further extension of the Candidacy construct and illustrate the importance of illness identities when accessing healthcare.Drawing on a secondary data analysis of three data sets of qualitative interviews from colorectal cancer and heart failure patients we found that though similar access issues are apparent prediagnosis, diagnosis marks a critical juncture in the experience of access. Cancer patients describe a 2 person-centred responsive healthcare system where their patienthood requires only modest assertion. Cancer speaks for itself. In marked contrast heart failure patients, describe struggling within a seemingly impermeable system to understand their illness, its implications and their own legitimacy as patients. Our work highlights the pressing need for healthcare professionals, systems and policies to promote a person centred approach, which is responsive and timely, regardless of illness category. To achieve this, attitudes regarding the importance or priority afforded to different categories of illness need to be tackled as they directly influence ideas of Candidacy and consequently access and experiences of care.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Illness identity as an important component of candidacy: Contrasting experiences of help-seeking and access to care in cancer and heart disease

Macdonald

Blane

Browne

et al. 2016

Social Science & Medicine

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“…Details of these have been published in fuller detail elsewhere (Seale, 2001a) so a brief summary is provided. A commercially available on-line database (NEXIS) of world-wide newspaper articles was used to retrieve 2419 articles appearing in the English-language press during the first week of October 1999 that contained the words 'cancer', 'leukaemia' or 'leukemia'.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Seale

2002

Sociology

Self Cite

142

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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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“…'Cancer is War' was found to be the most frequently used metaphor, a finding which is supported by earlier research (eg. Van Rijn-van Togeren, 1997;Clarke, 1992;Seale, 2001). This construction is also something that Sontag's (1991) early polemic against the use of metaphor in cancer discourse identified and challenged.…”

Section: Discursive Constructions Of Cancer and Its Meaningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cancer diagnosis as discursive capture: Phenomenological repercussions of being positioned within dominant constructions of cancer

Willig

2011

Social Science & Medicine

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This paper is concerned with the phenomenological repercussions of being positioned within widely available social constructions of cancer. Being diagnosed with cancer can constitute a challenge because it requires the person to make sense of the diagnosis and to find meaning in their changed circumstances. From a social constructionist point of view, such meaning is made out of discursive resources which are available within one's culture. This paper reviews some of the dominant discourses surrounding cancer which are available within English-speaking Western Industrialised cultures. It maps out the discursive positions available to those diagnosed with cancer and it traces some of their implications for how cancer can be experienced and how it may be lived with. The paper reflects on the relationship between discourse and phenomenology, arguing that in order to fully appreciate the experience of a cancer diagnosis we need to be aware of the discursive field within which it takes place.3

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Sporting cancer: struggle language in news reports of people with cancer

Cited by 94 publications

References 26 publications

Illness identity as an important component of candidacy: Contrasting experiences of help-seeking and access to care in cancer and heart disease

Illness identity as an important component of candidacy: Contrasting experiences of help-seeking and access to care in cancer and heart disease

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

Cancer diagnosis as discursive capture: Phenomenological repercussions of being positioned within dominant constructions of cancer

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