Julie Mengert (she/her/hers)

Associate Director of Composition

Virginia Tech

Description of Work:

While I am a full-time faculty member at Virginia Tech, I am also working on my PhD in rhetoric and writing and am currently writing my dissertation, which is the focus of the work for this symposium. My dissertation topic is the rhetoric of metastatic breast cancer (MBC). More specifically, I am interested in studying the language used by patients to define and describe what is a relatively new medical phenomenon: living with stage IV breast cancer for a long period of time, and I am questioning how developments in MBC have changed or affected a very stable war rhetoric that has been dominant. Historically, a war or battle rhetoric has dominated cancer discourse, but this rhetoric has been heavily critiqued by many scholars who have examined the harmful nature of the war metaphor, which often depicts cancer as a battle that the patient must win in order to survive. However, for stage IV breast cancer patients, that battle is not one that can ultimately be won.

Yet these patients do not simply lose. Thanks to new technologies and treatments, stage IV breast cancer patients can live for a very long time. My focus, then, is on how these increased survival times for MBC patients have an impact on the language that is deployed in this discourse and how that language has adapted to these new developments. As new treatments have developed, some women with stage IV cancer now live for years after they receive a terminal diagnosis, potentially making the cancer a form of chronic illness. My broader view in this project is to analyze how language use has changed as medicine has evolved and how what it means to be a breast cancer patient has also evolved.

For this symposium, then, I am submitting a chapter from my dissertation: “The Dominant Rhetorical Formation in Breast Cancer Discourse: War Rhetoric.” This chapter will analyze the entrenched war metaphor as a rhetorical formation in breast cancer discourse. I am questioning how rhetorical formations come about within the discourse of MBC and where patients develop their language about their illness, using Celeste Condit’s framework of rhetorical formations as a theoretical underpinning of this chapter and my dissertation as a whole. As science makes breakthroughs and allows some women to live *with* cancer, it becomes evident that the war rhetorical formation does not fully represent women’s experiences with MBC.

Contact: jmengert@vt.edu