![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
Advanced epithelial ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecologic cancer; yet public knowledge about the disease is limited. This essay critically examines the limited visibility of ovarian cancer using Angelina Jolie’s medical announcements in 2013 and 2015 as examples. The essay also examines how Jolie’s case reinforces and also challenges hegemonic notions of femininity, the woman’s body and health, and how it explicates limitations in discourses of choice and risk. I argue that normative views about the female body play significant roles in shaping how and what we know about women’s health.
Notes
1. Stacey (Citation1997) had ovarian teratoma, a type of germ cell ovarian tumor. Germ cell tumors are rare, affect mostly younger women, and have better prognosis compared with other types of ovarian tumors.
2. The women’s health movement was concerned mainly with abortion and birth control reforms, which had little direct benefit for the breast cancer movement. However, the women’s health movement’s efforts to help women re-examine understanding of the female body and their relationship to it was instrumental in instigating the breast cancer movement (Leopold Citation1999).
3. Boesky found out later that it was not just ovarian cancer that runs in her family; her family is also predisposed to breast cancer, which her mother died from. Boesky had prophylactic mastectomy (in addition to the oophorectomy) but was still indecisive about getting genetic testing (Boesky Citation2013).
4. This is not to suggest that decisions about prophylactic mastectomy and breast reconstruction are not vexing and that there are no health complications to these surgeries. It’s just that these procedures have become commonplace in the era we live in.