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Paper short abstract

Departing in recent writings on critical phenomenology this paper traces the construction of ‘alarm symptoms of cancer’, and argues that explorations into the configuration of ‘symptom experiences’ may form an analytic trope for the exploration of the contagious potentials of biomedical forms of knowledge.

Paper long abstract

The construction of diagnostic categories have for the past twenty years been extensively studied by sociologists and anthropologists; in particular their entanglements with the formation of 'diseased or at risk-subjects' and notions of body and self has been under scrutiny. Inspired by critical phenomenology and recent writings on issues such as amplification, articulation and organization of embodied experience (e.g. Throop, 2010), this paper suggests that the construction of 'symptom categories' as a way to know the body should warrant equal scholarly attention. Empirically, departing in an analysis of cancer diagnostics and the re-conceptualization of cancer as 'an acute disease' in the global north, the paper traces the construction of 'alarm symptoms of cancer', and argues that explorations into the configuration of symptom experiences may form an analytic trope for the exploration of the contagious potentials of biomedical forms of knowledge.