Nurturing Women and the BRCA Genes: Gender, Activism and the Paradox of Health Awareness.

This paper explores the relationship between breast cancer activism and a newly emergent arena of 'predictive' medicine, breast cancer genetics. Drawing on ethnographic research in UK cancer genetic clinics, it explores the way the goals and gendered values of a certain kind of breast cancer activism operate at the interface between patients and practitioners. It examines how the morality of health awareness and the value female nurturance are implicated in and configured by clinical encounters. Outlining the dense and dynamic 'traffic' around the work of transmission, the paper examines how the same gendered values that may enable this field of practice can also result in uneasy consequences for patients, their kin, as well as practitioners. Exploring these intersections demonstrates the scope and challenges for knowledge and care, as well as the paradoxical value of health awareness in an emerging field of genetic medicine.