Proud Disclosures and Awkward Receptions: Between bodies with cancer and their audiences

This chapter will demonstrate the potential for performance to blur the boundaries between the medical and social models of disability as it applies uniquely to illness whose discourse has been historical linked to ‘cure’ and its inevitability or impossibility. The chapter draws on classic theoretical understandings of illness/cancer – by means of Arthur W. Frank and Jackie Stacey – and puts them with current conversation in disability studies (such as with the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Petra Kuppers) and radical health and cancer activism/organising. By demonstrating historical and contemporary efforts to challenge the ‘sick role’ (Talcott Parsons, 1951) and the fundraising which has been built following on from this understanding of cancer, the chapter demonstrates creative and political potentials for audience/performer, starer/staree and patient/non-patient interactions in both artistic and public settings