ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we take on the ‘attitude industry’, as it were, and its role in the production of the transcendence of attitude within the cultural imaginary. Drawing on qualitative interview data from people living with cancer, we focus here on the deeply mixed feelings that our participants have towards the various facets of attitude (that is, positivity, negativity and everything in between) that they deploy, contest and resist in the context of their experiences of cancer. We seek not to dismiss attitude or to reify it (or people’s accounts of it); rather, we ask how it plays a role in the choreography of survivorship and how it makes its way into clinical encounters, family struggles and individual and collective psyches. We interrogate what role sociology might play in recognising the potency of attitude in everyday life while challenging its normative and even malevolent potentials.
