The Afterlife of Breast Cancer: Exploring the Digital Performativity of Post-Treatment Patienthood

Abstract

This article looks at the practices of digital performativity of bodies-in-remission on Instagram to detail the affective and temporal experience of post-treatment patienthood. To explore these performativities, I use the images and narratives of the post-treatment breast-cancer body to have a conversation about the vicarious ‘re-experience’ of the malady—now in abeyance—through the discursive register of fear and the clinical haunting of the everyday in trying to offset the side-effects of the treatment regimes. I further argue that these techno-digital enactments of post-treatment patienthood co-emerge through complex ‘intra-actions’ of and within entanglements of materialities, networks, discourses, affect, and multiple registers of techno-social mediation that shape and constrict them. Accordingly, this article is an effort to make sense of how people ‘memorise’ chronic illness and prolonged suffering—especially when it impacts key sources of their gender identity—through negotiations with the temporal-discursive processes of networked communications.