The Rhetoric of Previving: Blogging the Breast Cancer Gene

Abstract

Previvors, women with a genetic predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer, blog in response to the rhetorical needs of their community, needs that are fillable only in writing, for a specific audience, and to engage that audience to act. Previvor bloggers have created a rhetorical community in response to specific kairotic moments and have fulfilled three common rhetorical needs: to educate others, to advocate for more research into BRCA mutations and/or breast cancer research in general, and to support others in the BRCA+ community toward the main purpose of social action.

Notes

1. ¹I am grateful to RR reviewers Jeffrey Maciejewski and Michael Zerbe for their generative feedback on this article. I am also indebted to Gregory Hafer and Aaron Beasley for their research assistance. I will forever be appreciative to the BRCA+ bloggers who have educated me, inspired me, and supported me as a writer, a patient, and an activist.

2. ²Men are just as likely to inherit a BRCA mutation as women are; however, I have yet to find a blog written by a BRCA+ man. Thus this article focuses on and refers only to women bloggers.

3. ³The number of previvor bloggers is almost negligible when compared to breast cancer survivor bloggers.

4. ⁴While other celebrities have “come out” about breast cancer and their mastectomies (for example, Christina Applegate, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow), Jolie Pitt is one of the first to have been public about having a preventative mastectomy and is arguably the most famous.

5. ⁵In keeping with feminist rhetorical practices, I should disclose that I am a previvor. I also have a blog in which I tell my own previvor story. The blog is anonymous and is not discussed or analyzed here. For that reason, I refer to previvor bloggers as “they” instead of “we.”

6. ⁶It is possible that more blogs appeared and have since been removed from the Internet. It’s difficult to track exactly how many previvor blogs exist. There is no way to search Google only for blogs, and a Google search of “blog + BRCA” turns up over 370,000 results, which would include any site that contains the word blog but not necessarily a blog itself. To find BRCA blogs, I turned to the Facebook previvor groups as well as FORCE. FORCE has a list of twenty-three blogs on its community page. Some Facebook previvor groups have lists of blogs; these lists include those listed on the FORCE page, along with about fifteen or so more. After clicking through all of the blogs to determine which are current, I determined that approximately forty-five previvor blogs are live on the Internet at the time of this writing, although they are not all currently being updated.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bryna Siegel Finer

Bryna Siegel Finer is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where she directs the Liberal Studies English program and Writing across the Curriculum. She welcomes feedback at [email protected].