Heredity, gender and the discourse of ovarian cancer

Healthy women have elected to undergo preventive, or “prophylactic” surgery in order to lower perceived risk for ovarian cancer for some time. The development and commercialization of cancer susceptibility tests has altered the justification for prophylactic surgery. As a result, the rationale for undergoing oophorectomies (the removal of the ovaries) has taken on greater significance in biomedical discourse as a reasonable course of action for women who have been told they have a significant risk for these cancers. Although new in many respects, cancer susceptibility genetic tests are incorporated into old frameworks for defining, understanding, and treating disease. This essay addresses what some of those discursive/material conditions are, in part by addressing fundamental assumptions that inform the ways in which genetic medicine is interpreted and crafted in response to women's cancers. BRCA research, I argue, represents the powerful intersection of heredity and gender bias in biomedicine. The result is a new, “rational” discourse of diseasing women's reproductive organs.