Title: Associate Professor
University: Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Email: brynasf@iup.edu
Twitter: brynasf_edu
Website: brynasiegelfiner.wordpress.com
Description of Work:
I am interested in the rhetoric of previvors (those genetically predisposed to disease/disorders, specifically breast and ovarian cancer) and about previvors, but in general I am working on advocating for more explicit women’s healthcare advocacy. By analyzing the rhetoric of and about previvors, I am hoping to encourage a more critical stance toward the breast cancer industry as an industry – a consumerist industry – and call for women to demand better for their health and a more feminist rhetoric of medicine and healthcare. I have been tracing the rhetorical effects of Angelina Jolie’s New York Times piece, ““My Medical Choice,” in which she revealed that she’d learned she had a BRCA1 mutation, putting her at high-risk for breast and ovarian cancer, and therefore she’d had a preventative bilateral mastectomy. In my current work, I am (1) analyzing Jolie’s editorial as an example of agnatological discourse (Segal, 2007), (2) providing evidence of the problems that arise from reproducing this ignorance, (3) analyzing examples of feminist bloggers who counter this cultural reproduction in order to (4) call for a more “apparent feminism” (Frost, 2015) in women’s healthcare activism.
Symposium Submission:
The Reframing of “My Medical Choice” to “The Angelina Effect”:A Call for Feminist Healthcare Activism in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine
In her May 2013 New York Times op-ed, “My Medical Choice,” Angelina Jolie revealed that
she’d learned she had a BRCA1 mutation, putting her at high-risk for breast and ovarian cancer, and
therefore she’d had a preventative bilateral mastectomy. Jolie is a “previvor,” an “individual who is
a survivor of a predisposition to cancer but who hasn’t had the disease” (FORCE). Her narrative is
similar to other previvor narratives. While their stories are different, previvor narratives follow
several generic tropes like breast cancer narratives do; in this way, although Jolie is not a breast
cancer survivor, her narrative in the op-ed is similar to those described by Segal (2007), as
agnatological, or reproducing cultural ignorance (p.4). Segal uses this frame to demonstrate how an
entrenched standard narrative makes it nearly impossible to write an activist narrative, explaining
why dialogue about breast cancer is never really advanced (p.18). In an expanded presentation of
this work, I (1) analyze Jolie’s editorial as an example of agnatological discourse, (2) provide
evidence of the problems that arise from reproducing this ignorance, (3) analyze examples of
women bloggers who counter this cultural reproduction in order to (4) call for a more “apparent
feminism” (Frost, 2015) in women’s healthcare activism. Below, I discuss a slice of this work in the
allotted word limit.
In their Time magazine feature, “The Angelina Effect,” published only a month after Jolie’s
NYT essay, the authors expressed concern that “the gravitational pull of a superstar role model has
a way of distorting what needs to be a highly individual decision,” implying that there might be a
sharp increase in the number of women deciding to have their breasts voluntarily removed because
of Jolie’s decision to do so herself; they compare this to the sharp increase in families naming their
babies Viviene after Jolie did in 2008. The difference in gravity of these two situations should be
obvious, but the authors make the comparison as if the significance to women is clearly analogous.
This ignorance is continually reproduced throughout the article and many like it; in these articles,
medical providers often express concern that women would have unnecessary surgeries because
they are influenced by Jolie.
For example, Dr. Frank Lipman wrote in his wellness blog, “I worry that other women with
family histories of breast cancer will now rush out to get BRCA testing, and if they test positive, they
will follow her lead and undergo potentially unnecessary and possibly dangerous elective surgery. I
sincerely hope others think twice before undergoing genetic testing that will put them in the
difficult position of having to choose between their breasts and their peace of mind.” This is only
one example where a doctor asserts that women might not think because Jolie has already done the
thinking for them; it is also only one example where a doctor cannot fathom that a woman might
choose peace of mind over her breasts.
Practitioners like Lipman have rhetorically reframed a woman’s medical decision to have a
mastectomy as a cultural phenomenon, something akin to the Jennifer Anniston “Friends” haircut
that abounded in the 1990s. But hair and healthcare are not analogous. As with many issues in
women’s healthcare, mainstream media has reframed the conversation to say: women are unable
to or shouldn’t be allowed to make their own choices about this. Dubriwny writes, “narratives
about women’s health…not only depict a certain understanding of a given health issue but also
construct, or articulate, specific identities for individuals depicted in the narrative” (p.5). When the
media continually constructs preventative mastectomies as something women might do without
thinking carefully enough about it, they create an identity for the women who do have the surgery:
uninformed, hysterical, bad decision makers. As rhetoricians in health and medicine, we need to
call more attention to narratives that counter this reproduced ignorance – narratives that put
women’s choice back into the equation and call attention to the harrowing lack of progress in
women’s healthcare.
Some women have, in fact, critiqued Jolie’s op-ed. They are what Dubriwny might call,
“feminist activists working on women’s health [who] form a ‘counter-public’ to the dominant
discourses of women’s health in the public sphere” (p.153). In other parts of this work, I provide
examples of feminist activists writing counter-narratives, and I make use Frost’s “apparent
feminism,” a methodology that encourages and recognizes perspectives that counter “current
political trends that render misogyny unapparent at the nexus of social, ethical, political, and
practical technical communication domains,” (p.5) to look at feminist discourse operating as
activism in women’s healthcare in response to the “Jolie Effect.”
I also provide examples of what Dubriwny describes: “writers and bloggers… working to
provide the discursive space in which challenging medical authorities and questioning treatments
from a feminist perspective is routine” (p.67). The counter-discourse is where the important
questions are asked, as I show through examples of critiques of Jolie’s op-ed. These women disrupt
the standard agnatological previvor and survivor narratives, encourage a more critical stance
toward the breast cancer industry as an industry – a consumerist industry – and call for women to
demand better for their health and a more feminist rhetoric of medicine and healthcare.
References
Dubriwny, T. (2012). The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s
Health. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP.
Frost, E. (2015). Apparent feminism as a methodology for technical communication and rhetoric.
Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 30(1). 3-28. doi:
10.1177/1050651915602295
Jolie, A. (2013, May 13) My medical choice. The New York Times. Retrieved from
Kluger, J., Park, A., Pickert, K., Schrobsdorff, S., Sifferlin, A., & Rothman, L. (2013). The Angelina
Effect. Time, 181(20).
Lipman, F. (2013). Was Angelina Jolie medically hexed? The Be-Well Blog. Retrieved from
Segal, J. (2007). Breast cancer narratives as public rhetoric: genre itself and the maintenance of
ignorance. Linguistics and the Human Sciences. 3(1). 3-23. doi:10.1558/lhs.v3i1.3