the Female Body GOVERNING

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and dependence on the care of others. We are ‘people with AIDS’”
(Navarre, 1988, p. 148).
The recognition that identity categories—the means through which
people with disease are labeled and categorized—could signifi cantly
shape the course of a disease and society’s response to it has had
profound implications for the formation and strategies of health activist
movements in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Through processes of
what social movement scholars call “social movement spillover”—when
new movements grow from the foundations of existing movements and
borrow from their strengths and strategies—the health activist groups
that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, while diverse in their agendas and
strategies, shared a sense of the importance of disease identity categories
that suggested live, active, and empowered individuals. Among cancer
activists, this recognition was evidenced by the gradual disappearance of
the label “cancer victim” (and to a slightly less extent, “cancer patient”)
from public discourse and its replacement with the “cancer survivor.”
This shift was given institutional legitimacy and form in 1986
with the formation of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship
(NCCS). Their organization was the first, the NCCS claims, to define
an individual diagnosed with cancer as a survivor from “the moment
of diagnosis and for the balance of life.” Since that time, NCCS has
been a leading force in advocating for “survivor’s rights” by lobbying
for increased funding for cancer research and access to quality cancer
care and sponsoring educational publications and programming. The
founding of the NCCS was followed by the formation of other cancer
survivorship organizations (the American Cancer Society’s Cancer
Survivors Network, for example) and a move on the part of existing
organizations to place survivorship at the center of their missions and
at the heart of their public relations activities. While in some cases a
professed interest in “survivorship” was just another term for commitment
to research on prevention, treatment, and cure, in other cases
“survivorship” came to represent a new realm of scientific concern, a
hitherto neglected phase of the experience of cancer. An April 6, 1998,
Dallas Morning News article explained the development as follows, “As
many as 10 million Americans call themselves cancer survivors. Yet
until recently, their well-being has been largely unexplored by most
doctors and medical researchers” (Beil, 1998, p. 7D). As a result, the
cancer survivor became—or rather was constituted as—a subject of
scientific investigation and several leading cancer organizations instituted
programs to encourage the study of the physical and mental
well being of people who had lived through the disease. In 1996, the
National Cancer Institute created the Office of Cancer Survivorship