African Kaposi's sarcoma in the light of global AIDS: antiblackness and viral visibility

Cancer

Previous work in the anthropology of cancer often examined causes, risks, and medical, familial, and embodied relationships created by the disease. Recent writing has expanded that focus, attending to cancer as a “total social fact” ( Jain 2013 ) and dissecting the landscape of “carcinogenic relationships” ( Livingston 2012 ). Cancer-driven relationships become subjectively real through individual suffering, stigma, and inequality. This article traces concepts developed from a primarily US-centered discourse to a global cancer discourse, including cancer-related issues continuing to raise concern such as stigma, narrative moments of critical reflection on the dominance of biomedicine, and processes by which individuals and communities manage inadequate access to biomedical technologies. Beyond the medical relations and politics of cancer, this article considers the ways in which ethnography addresses local moral worlds and differences that come to matter in attending to the disease, the person, and consequent social and material relations.

Disease, communication, and the ethics of (in) visibility

As the recent Ebola outbreak demonstrates, visibility is central to the shaping of political, medical, and socioeconomic decisions. The symposium in this issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry explores the uneasy relationship between the necessity of making diseases visible, the mechanisms of legal and visual censorship, and the overall ethics of viewing and spectatorship, including the effects of media visibility on the perception of particular "marked" bodies. Scholarship across the disciplines of communication, anthropology, gender studies, and visual studies, as well as a photographer's visual essay and memorial reflection, throw light on various strategies of visualization and (de)legitimation and link these to broader socioeconomic concerns. Questions of the ethics of spectatorship, such as how to evoke empathy in the representation of individuals' suffering without perpetuating social and economic inequalities, are explored in individual, (trans-)national, and global contexts, demonstrating how disease (in)visibility intersects with a complex nexus of health, sexuality, and global/national politics. A sensible management of visibility--an "ecology of the visible"--can be productive of more viable ways of individual and collective engagement with those who suffer.