Communication Studies and Feminist Perspectives on Ovarian Cancer: (Bloomsbury Studies in Health Communication)

Communication Studies and Feminist Perspectives on Ovarian Cancer examines the embodied experience of ovarian cancer by critically analyzing impacts of normative social and medical discourses—including discourses of risk, choice, early detection, lack of reliable screening tests for ovarian cancer, feminine beauty, and self-advocacy—on women’s communicative responses to the disease and treatments. It argues that these discourses help discredit some ovarian cancer experiences, encourage a one-dimensional perspective on the disease, and divert attention from larger issues such as society’s disregard for women’s complaints about disease symptoms. Blanket promotion of these discourses essentializes women’s experiences of the disease, pointing out how normative beliefs about women’s health and illness are often flipped and repackaged as standard language to discuss women’s experiences. Using interview data and scholarly work from communication studies, feminist studies, critical/cultural studies, anthropology, critical psychology, and other disciplines, this book suggests we give equal importance to personal experiences and medical/scientific research to advance knowledge about ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is a disease specific to women; as such, women’s experiences cannot be minimized in attempts to understand the disease.

Table of Contents:
CHAPTER 1. Introduction CHAPTER 2. (Not)making Sense: Receiving an Uncertain Diagnosis CHAPTER 3. Setting Boundaries and Distancing Selves: Owning The Lived Experience of Ovarian Cancer CHAPTER 4. Becoming an Ovarian Cancer Survivor: Managing Uncertainty and Survivor’s Guilt CHAPTER 5. “I Feel Different”: Ovarian Cancer and Sexual Self-Concept CHAPTER 6. Advocacy and Self-Advocacy in the Ovarian Cancer Context (With Gini Steinke) CHAPTER 7. Afterward: Marrying the Personal and Medical to Improve Ovarian Cancer Bibliography Index About the Author

About the Author :
Dinah A. Tetteh is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Arkansas State University.

Review :
Informed by rhetorical and feminist scholarship on women’s health, Dinah Tetteh rightfully centers her analysis of women’s ovarian cancer experiences on women’s voices. Tetteh’s work is particularly insightful when she asks us to reconsider from a feminist perspective our expectations for and assumptions about women and ovarian cancer, from reckoning with the “survivor’s guilt” of a stage 1 survivor to broadening our understanding of self-advocacy. Tetteh’s book invites us to think critically about the discourse of women’s health self-advocacy, directing our attention to the specific challenges of being an “assertive, outspoken, and compliant” ovarian cancer patient. Her study’s explicitly feminist methodology moves from the “Angelina Jolie effect” to the experiences and voices of a group of non-famous women with ovarian cancer, reinforcing her assertion of the importance of a partnership between women with ovarian cancer and the medical and research communities.