Being at Genetic Risk

For decades, women who carry BRCA mutations have been told the same thing: how, and whether, to deal with their risk of breast and ovarian cancer is entirely their choice. Kelly Pender questions that framing, and also the critics who reply that the choice is really made for them. She argues that the language of choice hides more than it reveals, and that a conversation built around care would show far more of what is at stake with a BRCA diagnosis.

Through a praxiographic reading of the medical practices surrounding BRCA risk, Pender shows that genetic risk is not only something these women know but something they do, and that through this doing it becomes real in their lives. A careful, rigorous study for scholars of rhetoric and medicine, and for anyone who works with or advocates for people living at genetic risk.