5. (Re)materialising Cancer: Bodies, Cells and Environments
Bioscientific approaches to identifying, classifying and diagnosing cancer have long enrolled practices that engage with the materiality of tumour tissues and cells, such as cytology and histology. In the contemporary era, scientific techniques detect and act upon cancer outwith tumour tissue itself. For example, pre-cells, inflammatory cells, immune system T cells and microbes are becoming understood to play a role in cancer. Molecular pathology has also allowed for exploration of the makeup of cancerous tissues as inscribed within genetic code, and can ‘diagnose’ predispositions to cancer. Such techniques, along with designations of cells as ‘pre-cancerous’, add a temporal dimension to the materiality of cancer. These approaches locate cancer within structures and organisms beyond the tangibility of tumour tissue, and demonstrate that various elements of bodies and their environments continuously interact to constitute the disease.
Contemporary scientific work thus generates a picture of cancer as more than malignant, fleshy tumours, with the disease materialising in genes, healthy cells, and wider (bodily) environments. This refigures the material constitution of cancer, blurs clinical categorisations of tissues and cells as malignant or benign, and prompts us to think about cancer in ways that unsettle widespread ‘fixed’ sociocultural understandings of the disease. In this session we will discuss configurations of cancer that disrupt understandings of the disease as manifested in a malignant, fleshy, tumour. We ask ‘what constitutes cancer?’ and address the implications of these diverse configurations for scientific and clinical practice, embodied experiences, patient subjectivities, and sociocultural depictions of cancer.
