Cancer’s Uncertain Identity: A Narrative and Performative Model for Coping

Abstract

I offer my former experiences coping with adolescent cancer as evidence to warrant my exploration into coping as a narrative and performative matter of identity. I articulate coping as performative and narrative apperception, wherein the act of coping can be a performative act reflexively tethered to narrative identity, and entrenched in sociocultural constructs. I argue that (a) a cancer diagnosis and cancer narratives are language in action; (b) there is a liminal and uncertain state of all cancer patients, and adolescent patients in particular; and (c) narratives and their discursive structures create, and are created by, performed actions, narratives, and identities.