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Medical
Narratives/Cultural Stories: Thatcher Carter
Narrative plays a large role in medical practices. The patient's chief complaint, case history, and diagnosis are all told in narrative form, and these narratives, unfortunately, are often restrictive and misleading in their conclusions. In the first half of my presentation, I use Julia Epstein (Altered Conditions) and other theorists as a springboard to discuss narrative structures that have been used to homogenize breast cancer patients. In the second half, I present several autobiographies by women living with breast cancer, autobiographies that are able to break out of traditional narrative structures by confronting issues of normalization in western cultures as well as issues of how to tell a story of illness and how to enter the public discourse on breast cancer without necessarily taking on the narrative structures of that discourse. In this presentation, I explore three autobiographies: Deena Metzger's Tree, Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum's Cancer in Two Voices, and Jo Spence's Putting Myself in the Picture, for which I have slides as well as discussion. The whole of their work, with proper exposure, could coalesce into a new, public discourse on breast cancer that actively challenges the parameters and definitions of categories such as normality, selfhood, and autobiographical structure.
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