불확실성과 함께 살아가기: 유방암 환자/경험자들의 자기관리 실천이 제기하는 윤리적 질문들

TY - JOUR

T1 - 불확실성과 함께 살아가기

T2 - 유방암 환자/경험자들의 자기관리 실천이 제기하는 윤리적 질문들

AU - Lee, Jieun

PY - 2016

Y1 - 2016

N2 - This article explores the culture of ‘self-care’ among women whose breast cancer is now in remission. This article shows how the practices of self-care and related health discourses enable those women to cope with the tension between the temporality of “living in progonisis” characterized by the vulnerability of the body and life’s precariousness, and the temporality of modern life which is sustained by the foreclosure of the life’s precariousness. While biomedicine promises that cancer patients can be cured and restituted to health, people whose cancer is now in remission realize the promise was an impossible one. The popular health discourses on stress, immunity, and eating are actively incorporated in the ‘self-care’ culture among cancer patients in remission, as they could relate those discourses to the precarious conditions of living in remission. Attending to the precariousness of living in remission, I show how the practices of self-care are not simply pragmatic responses taken by cancer patients to prevent recurrence, but also ethical gestures which they carry out to recover the agency of the self to control the body and live the “normal” life, which has been disrupted by the experiences of cancer and the anticipation of its recurrence. The discourses of stress, immunity, and eating resonate with the sustained anxiety that those patients feel, and further work as a kind of grip for taming the precariousness. These discourses help patients to live the precarious present, threatened by the unknown life of cancer cells in the body and fear about the future that might come to be. The practices of self-care show the struggle of cancer patients in remission to recuperate the self as a “normal” person, an autonomous individual who can freely choose and plan the future. Indeed, the agency the patients are trying to recuperate is a fantastic figure of the modern subject with the capacity to control one’s life, and their efforts reveal the fantasy, or even the violence of the modern ideal of life, which is constitutive of biomedicine’s temporality.

AB - This article explores the culture of ‘self-care’ among women whose breast cancer is now in remission. This article shows how the practices of self-care and related health discourses enable those women to cope with the tension between the temporality of “living in progonisis” characterized by the vulnerability of the body and life’s precariousness, and the temporality of modern life which is sustained by the foreclosure of the life’s precariousness. While biomedicine promises that cancer patients can be cured and restituted to health, people whose cancer is now in remission realize the promise was an impossible one. The popular health discourses on stress, immunity, and eating are actively incorporated in the ‘self-care’ culture among cancer patients in remission, as they could relate those discourses to the precarious conditions of living in remission. Attending to the precariousness of living in remission, I show how the practices of self-care are not simply pragmatic responses taken by cancer patients to prevent recurrence, but also ethical gestures which they carry out to recover the agency of the self to control the body and live the “normal” life, which has been disrupted by the experiences of cancer and the anticipation of its recurrence. The discourses of stress, immunity, and eating resonate with the sustained anxiety that those patients feel, and further work as a kind of grip for taming the precariousness. These discourses help patients to live the precarious present, threatened by the unknown life of cancer cells in the body and fear about the future that might come to be. The practices of self-care show the struggle of cancer patients in remission to recuperate the self as a “normal” person, an autonomous individual who can freely choose and plan the future. Indeed, the agency the patients are trying to recuperate is a fantastic figure of the modern subject with the capacity to control one’s life, and their efforts reveal the fantasy, or even the violence of the modern ideal of life, which is constitutive of biomedicine’s temporality.

UR - https://koanthro.jams.or.kr/po/volisse/sjPubsArtiPopView.kci?soceId=INS000000775&artiId=SJ0000000281&sereId=SER000000001&submCnt=1

M3 - Tidsskriftartikel

SN - 1226-055x

VL - 49

SP - 131

JO - Korean Cultural Anthropology (한국문화인류학)

JF - Korean Cultural Anthropology (한국문화인류학)

IS - 2

ER -