Staying Positive: Women's illness narratives and the stigmatized vernacular

Abstract

This article uses the stigmatized vernacular (Goldstein & Shuman, 2012) as a conceptual framework for examining the public construction and reception of women’s illness narratives. I begin by making the case that personal illness narratives – a genre that works to translate the subjective illness experience to a public audience – are rich sites for exploring how discourses of veneration and repudiation can become inextricably intertwined. Discussing illustrative examples of the construction and reception of women’s illness narratives shared in contexts of breast cancer and fibromyalgia, I show how popular understandings of emotions, particularly positive emotions like happiness, play a major role in the regimes of value shaping how women’s illness experiences become tellable or untellable, and thereby valued or devalued. Integrating scholarship on illness narratives, stigma, and happiness, I aim to contribute to a richer and more multifaceted view of the illness narrative genre and the discursive contagion of stigma.

The Imperative for a Triumph-Over-Tragedy Story in Women’s Accounts of Undergoing Chemotherapy for Ovarian Cancer

“…. then you don’t sit down and panic about it.” Here, she struggles to articulate her experience between seemingly incongruent positions of “awful” and “sail[ing] through it,” and immediately after speaking about its awfulness she goes on to repair and reinstate her position of taking a “positive mental attitude.” This discursive struggle highlights the challenge these women appeared to face when asked to speak directly about their experiences, in light of prevailing discursive constructions of positively coping with cancer (Bock, 2013; Willig, 2011).…”

Performing health identities on social media: An online observation of Facebook profiles

“…Whereas scholars such as Orgad (2006) and Bock (2013) have pointed out that users of support fora face pressure to produce a success story of how they cope with their illness, for SNSs users the situation may be exacerbated by the (sometimes) unspoken norms and affordances of the sites. Although the rhetoric and politics of 'happiness' and its institutionalization predates the use of SNSs, social media have played an important role in the reception and dissemination of claims about life as one would want to live it.…”

The Social Reception of Women With Cancer

“…Following on from conceptualizations of stigma, the provision of care and support has been portrayed within previous work to be dependent on a particular illness or illness type. Certain illnesses are culturally venerated and considered more valid, whereas others are repudiated or discredited, which makes it easier for some people to speak of their illness and gain support compared with others (e.g., cancer vs. fibromyalgia, see Bock, 2013). Similarly, as we have discussed, certain forms of an illness will garner greater compassion and care than others (e.g., breast cancer vs. cervical cancer), depending on different assumptions about what caused a person’s cancer and how much control she or he had over developing it (Bell, 2010; Dyer, 2010).…”