How do cancer patients express their points of view?

Abstract

Abstract This paper analyses the representations of cancer on the basis of a corpus of letters addressed by cancer patients to the ‘Concertation Nationale sur le Cancer’.Whenever social agents tackle the question of the aetiology of their cancer, their act consists of retaining data borrowed from medical models and organising it into a narrative reconstruction that gives a meaning to the appearance of their disease. In our case, this reconstruction is based upon a homology between social disorder and biological disorder, which constitutes their frame of reference for defining their personal responsibility. Being able to classify oneself as ‘innocent’ seems to be a necessary condition entitling one to convey one's point of view in public and, in particular, a condition for expressing a critical discourse with regard to the representations of cancer made by non‐afflicted persons. The very act of writing to the Concertation Nationale Cancer is a political act ‐ an ‘official’ intervention in regard to representations is sought through the invalidation of the opinions of the healthyHowever, these critical discourses are not free from the very representations which constitute the targets of their criticisms. Cancer patients are still prisoners of ‘archaic representations of the disease’.