Cancer? Keep writing

I’ve been thinking for a while about the strange hold cancers have on medicine and charity. More than anything, the concept of ‘racing for the cure’ or supporting research for a cure (and it always concerns a cure…) for cancer remains above questioning, truly apolitical. I suppose I’m merely interested in thinking about why.

Victim status: People with cancer are treated as if they are under assault, or subject to random violence. They assume victim status. However this relationships seems peculiar to me: cancer employs the body, the person, against itself; it does not strike so much as transform the self. The erasure of the body points towards the real problems of anti-cancer discourse, which is who is affected, and why.

I think cancer is a peculiarly industrial disease. A variety of industrial developments make debilitating cancer more likely: in this sense, cancer as a problem privileges a particular population on an international-developmental sense. Dying from cancer also means living long enough and not dying from a variety of faster moving environmental hazards, such as starvation. In a finer scale, cancers and similar diseases concentrate in areas around industrial chemical use and production, associated with economic and racial discriminations. Focusing on more than a ‘cure’ reveals the contours of production as a determining factor in the impact of cancer, perhaps politicizing it.

I think the corporeal impact of cancer determines the impact of appeals to stop it. The body itself rebels, rather than being subject to invasion or attack, dodging questions of action or exposure in correspondence to illness. Diseases like AIDS, a cold, etc. have a relationship to certain practices of self-care, boundary defense or preservation that focus discussion on prevention. Cancer’s causes lie outside individual human agency, in a particular realm of the democratic imaginary already a-political in many senses (economics: the naturalness of the market, the overwhelming power of industrial capital), making the cure equally apolitical.

Duncan