Abstract
Background: Over the past several decades, practices of western medicine, especially in the context of public health, have become increasingly tied with state security apparatuses. These methodological and epistemological shifts in framing public health in terms of national security have shaped the ways that health care has been performed and articulated, as well as the ways in which both state and private actors have been granted participatory access within fields traditionally reserved for security experts or medical professionals. Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001 against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there has been significant medicalization of foreign political actors on the United States' list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) in particular, with both oncologists and national security planners continually using the metaphor of cancer to describe the organizations themselves, as well as the behavior, intentions, and motivations of these groups.
Methods: This project utilized a mixed method approach employing discourse analysis, with an emphasis on metaphor analysis, to examine the way that cancer is deployed as an ideological technology within United States policy planning documents, Department of Defense publications, popular media articles covering the War on Terror, and speeches by senior political figures. This research uses these same methods to examine the ways in which the field of cancer biology/cancer medicine utilizes or participates in constructing the threat of political groups designated as FTOs through academic publications, popular media, and professional research in service of, or funded by, national security interests.
Results: The equation of cancer and war generally, and terrorism specifically, by both medical professionals and national security experts is broad and serves a number of ideological purposes. Often this is done with the explicit purpose of justifying violence against marginalized political groups designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the United States, though public awareness and funding were often found as motivations as well. Several of the cancer metaphors we encountered from security experts were imprecise and medically inaccurate in their descriptions, though still rhetorically powerful in how they were deployed. Given the importance in how the work of medical practitioners is depicted and its influence on how many types of health care are received, especially by marginalized communities, more work is needed in this area.
Citation Format: Amanda Ray, Wesley Dwyer. Representations of cancer as a national security threat: An examination of public health and public policy discourse. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Ninth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2016 Sep 25-28; Fort Lauderdale, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2017;26(2 Suppl):Abstract nr A21.
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