This article presents podcasting as a medium open to unprivileged groups, such as (self-defined) women. As podcasters, women can control their self-representation and their own meaning-making, especially when they address deviant/taboo bodily experiences, such as disability and disease. In this paper, three podcasts on breast cancer will be analyzed from a feminist perspective: Les Combattantes (RTL, 2019/20), Kontratak (independent, 2021), and Im/Patiente (Nouvelles Écoutes, 2019/20). The three podcasts emerge as an occasion for people pushed into a position of vulnerability, as both gendered subjects and as patients, to affirm their epistemic authority on illness (the personal experience of life with a cancer) and sickness (the social expectations attached to the role of breast cancer patient). Their stories transcend the individual experience to become a shared narrative: they are collective autopathographies (Rossi 2017), a testimony of life with cancer and, as such, the occasion for exercising acoustical agency through the voiced Self and the collective representation of a marginalized group.
Podcasts as collective autopathographies: An analysis of the empowering narratives of illness and healing of French women with breast cancer
Nora Gattiglia
2023-01-01
Abstract
This article presents podcasting as a medium open to unprivileged groups, such as (self-defined) women. As podcasters, women can control their self-representation and their own meaning-making, especially when they address deviant/taboo bodily experiences, such as disability and disease. In this paper, three podcasts on breast cancer will be analyzed from a feminist perspective: Les Combattantes (RTL, 2019/20), Kontratak (independent, 2021), and Im/Patiente (Nouvelles Écoutes, 2019/20). The three podcasts emerge as an occasion for people pushed into a position of vulnerability, as both gendered subjects and as patients, to affirm their epistemic authority on illness (the personal experience of life with a cancer) and sickness (the social expectations attached to the role of breast cancer patient). Their stories transcend the individual experience to become a shared narrative: they are collective autopathographies (Rossi 2017), a testimony of life with cancer and, as such, the occasion for exercising acoustical agency through the voiced Self and the collective representation of a marginalized group.
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