Millions of young women across the world are getting cancer and surviving. Breast, ovarian, uterine and cervical cancers are rising alarmingly in women under 40. These cancers leave in their wake a severe impact on notions of femininity, societal roles, body image, and reproductive choices. Yet approaches to cancer treatment and the health system as a whole do nothing to hand-hold a woman survivor as she goes out into the world with a new identity.
It is well-established that survivorship in early cancers of breast, ovary or the uterus is as high as 95-99%. Yet, there is little or no concept of care for women survivors who continue to be contributors to the workforce or participants in society.
Cancer diagnosis is not just about illness; it is about the disintegration and the reconstruction of normative identities — sexual, reproductive, biological. The loss of breasts, ovaries, or a uterus is not merely a medical procedure. It causes a rupture in how society perceives womanhood. It is also a crisis of access and justice in a system that frames fighting cancer as an individual battle rather than addressing its structural roots. Data show that only about 5%-10% of cancers are caused due to an inherited genetic anomaly. The entire onus of this explosion in the disease can therefore be placed on the idea of epigenetics — making most cancers preventable if toxins and
environmental stresses were to be removed. Cancer is, therefore, a grave public health crisis with roots embedded in the very ideas of profit and progress whose onus is borne by policy-makers, the State and the industry.
It is thus problematic to frame the narratives about cancer as a personal struggle. The rhetoric of ‘strong women beating cancer’ absolves governments, pharmaceutical companies, and policymakers of their responsibility to address the structural failures that cause thousands of preventable deaths every year.
The reality of a cancer survivor’s lived experience is very different from the sanitised, hyper-feminised depiction that we are made to consume on social media. Pink-washing breast cancer or fetishising the scars of cancer surgery does not take away the dangers of this serious public health crisis that deserves a rational, policy-oriented, health systems approach. The very industries that inject contamination into products
that we consume have usurped cancer as a creative pitch and identified women survivors as a potential market. Campaigns on beauty celebrating mastectomy scars or equitable gender roles that allow women to find the time for self-care and breast examination are but clever ruses to cash in on this growing multitude of young survivors.
Susan Sontag had argued in her seminal book, Illness as Metaphor, that a disease like cancer becomes a metaphor because it is “So charged with the fantasy of inescapable fatality.” She goes on to refer to the many ways in which cancer becomes a war rhetoric that can aptly express the most violent outrage — Trotsky calling Stalinism “the cancer of Marxism” or Sontag herself writing in despair over America’s war against Vietnam, “the white race is the cancer of human history.” Political alignments may have undergone polar shifts but cancer continues to be a favourite metaphor and cinematic device in popular culture.
Conversations about ovarian, breast or cervical cancers usually begin with whether or not women are being responsible with timely screening and end with chemotherapy, drastic surgeries and disease recurrence. Scant attention is paid to what comes after for women who survive. How they cope with the loss of libido, reproductive choices, sexuality, increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the early onset of menopause or premature osteoporosis and sarcopenia, cardiovascular risks, neuropathy and depression remains underexamined. It is time to change the way we talk about cancer — not as a metaphor of war or as stories of personal triumph or a battle that strong women win, but as a public health crisis that demands justice, political accountability, and an ethical industry.
Lopa Ghosh is a public health advocate and writer