Terminal anticipation: entanglements of affect and temporality in living with advanced cancer

Subjectivity and illness narratives

“…Engaging with subjectivity as produced in illness narratives, Kenny et al's (2017) essay in this collection acknowledges the fraught, partial, unfinished and unfolding materialities of human bodies that cannot be fully captured into a single, coherent narrative. Illness narratives underscore the interruptions of subjectivity and the chaotic aspects of human lives.…”

“…Narrative is problematic and requires problematisation (McKechnie 2014, p. 123). As a medium and a practice, it is integral for producing knowledge and relies on norms that Kenny et al (2017) in this special issue interrogate. We need to consider how subjectivities are both articulated through narrative and can also be conditioned by the norms that govern the articulation of narrative.…”

“…124-125). Kenny et al's (2017) essay demonstrates that the future remains uncertain, and the experience of advanced cancer produces futurity as precarious, doubtful and desirable. By questioning the dominance of narrative coherence, the authors uncover an incoherence that is always a possibility of narrative, a possibility albeit tamed and silenced by the normativity of coherence.…”

“…Kenny et al's (2017) essay examines both the norm of narrative coherence and the assumption of denouement and closure in illness narratives. Jason Danely's (2017) essay in this special issue examines the active shaping and transformation of family carers' subjectivity and experiences of extreme fatigue.…”

“…They collectively examine how forms of subjectivity are created, maintained and transformed through experiences of breast cancer (Greenhalgh 2017), traumatic brain injury (Mäkelä 2017), uncertain futures in the context of advanced cancer (Kenny, Broom, Kirby, Wyld and Lwin 2017), chronic pain (Barker 2017), and complex, existential angst and extreme tiredness caused by long-time caring for close elderly family members (Danely 2017). The papers in this collection chart narratives through which subjectivities are formed, reshaped and contested in the context of challenging illness experiences.…”