The Dialectics of Vulnerability: Breast Cancer and the Body in Prognosis

This essay argues that breast cancer prognosis potentially produces a dialectic in which the subject is compelled to perceive the body as vulnerable and separate (alien) to the self and that the treatments required make the body more vulnerable and more alien, and that this is held in tension with the fact that the very alienation and heightened vulnerability of the body in breast cancer treatment are productive. Such alienation and vulnerability collapse the boundaries through which the body and self are understood, often demand a conscious intimacy of/with the body, and point to critical enactments and understandings of embodied subjectivity.