The moral cosmology of cancer: Making disease meaningful

Abstract

More than a threat to embodied existence, cancer threatens various dimensions of social existence, including the general sense of inhabiting an ordered and moral universe. Here, we draw on sociological theory to interrogate the ontological politics of living with (and alongside) cancer. That is, how is cancer understood, made meaningful and enacted in relation to various others. Drawing on 130 interviews with people living with cancer and those close to them, we analyse people’s attempts to make cancer make sense, as well as the disciplinary consequences of apprehending cancer in this way. We focus, in particular, on the centrality of serendipity, conviction and regret in the meaning-making of cancer, and how they interact to produce complex affective and intersubjective relations. Moreover, we unpack how these logics and affects are part of a broader moral and ethical order of cancer, which entangles people within particular sets of relations: to living, to dying, and to others. We argue that the origins of luck, the practice of conviction and the affect of regret are critical facets of the ontological construction of cancer, with important consequences for survivorship.