Paper short abstract:

How are we living with cancer-as-potential? We suggest that contemporary cancer disease control efforts in Denmark, focusing on early diagnosis and cancer-as-potential, is increasingly colonizing everyday life, rendering both subjectivity and embodied sensations as always more or less cancerous.

Paper long abstract:

What does the contemporary cancer challenge look like from 'the other side of the cancer divide' where survival rates are higher and healthcare is accessible to all? In this paper, we ask questions not of avoidable mortality, but rather of how we live while attempting to avoid mortality. The Global North has for the past decade witnessed a radical (re-)emphasis on 'early diagnosis' as a means to control cancer disease. In this paper, we suggest that contemporary forms of cancer disease control in the welfare-state of Denmark renders a shift in biomedical attention; a shift from prevention to prediction, and a shift from identifying the cancerous body to one that focus on identifying the cancerous subject. Biotechnological and epidemiological developments feed into diagnostic imaginaries where biographical details, behaviors and sensorial experiences are transformed into potential medical signs. This shift represents a vast expansion in what are considered medical signs, as well as new ways of rendering these signs actionable (e.g. algorithms, cancer risk prediction). We suggest that focus on 'early diagnosis' craft social, moral and sensorial spaces of dissonance, with an increasing dissonance between the medical signs produced within the institutional structures that inform health promoters, and everyday forms of bodily experience and moral values that direct individual health practices. Overall, this has social and affective implications and challenge future healthcare system regulations and prioritizations. The paper is based on several years of working in the field of early diagnosis and ethnographic fieldworks among Danish citizens and health professionals.