ABSTRACT
Cancer, as Susan Sontag suggested in 1978, has long been a cultural touchstone, a metaphor of devastation and a spectre of social as well as bodily anomie and loss. Yet recent years have witnessed significant transformations in perceptions of cancer, particularly in perceptions of the cancer patient. This chapter is interested in the emergent ethic of care that underlies this “transvalued” cancer culture and particularly in the moral and cultural capital that has pervasively attached to the cancer patient as culture warrior. The analysis that follows takes up two intertwined case studies: on the one hand, the celebrity-scaled coalescence of what might be termed cancer’s warrior ethic, in the “brave face” of Angelina Jolie; and on the other, the “background noise” of everyday cancer representation, as deployed through the dominant tropes of cancer advertising. As this chapter will argue, this everyday imaginary sets the stage for the amplified Jolie-fication of cancer culture more broadly. The chapter begins with an account of the emergence of Jolie as the touchstone figuration of the cancer imaginary. Turning its focus to a long-running advertising campaign for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, the chapter then pursues three interlinked arguments. First is that contemporary cancer culture involves a potent articulation of popular, biocultural, and medico-commercial discourse, of which medical advertising is a salient case in point. Second is that the cancer patient has become a primary object of transference, typically represented as an edifying subject and a figuration of moral entitlement and moral capital. Third, and more specifically, is that the phantasmatic “good patient” embodies a distinctively neoliberal ethic of care—that is, body-affective imperatives of will, affect, and action—that constitutes cancer as an imperative field and in which an imperative of estrangement is a core dimension. As this chapter argues, cancer, in this intermediated space, has been recast such that its preeminent ethic of care is chiefly constituted by care’s repudiation.
