Cancer can kill: this fact makes it concrete.
Still, it's a devious knave. Nearly every American will
experience it up-close and all too personally, wondering
why the billions of research dollars thrown at the word
haven't exterminated it from the English language. Like
a sapper diffusing a bomb, Jain unscrambles the
emotional, bureaucratic, medical, and scientific tropes
that create the thing we call cancer. Scientists debate
even the most basic facts about the disease, while
endlessly generated, disputed, population data produce
the appearance of knowledge. Jain takes the vacuum at
the center of cancer seriously and demonstrates the need
to understand cancer as a set of relationships -
economic, sentimental, medical, personal, ethical,
institutional, statistical. Malignant analyzes the
peculiar authority of the socio-sexual psychopathologies
of body parts; the uneven effects of expertise and
power; the potentially cancerous consequences of medical
procedures such as IVF; the huge industrial investments
that manifest themselves as bone-cold testing rooms; the
legal mess of medical malpractice law; and the
teeth-grittingly jovial efforts to smear makeup and wigs
over the whole messy problem of bodies spiraling into
pain and decay. Malignant examines the painful cognitive
dissonances produced by the ways a culture that has
relished dazzling success in every conceivable arena
have twisted one of its staunchest failures into an
economic triumph. The intractable foil to American
achievement, cancer hands us - on a silver platter and
ready for Jain's incisively original dissection - our
sacrifice to the American Dream.
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