Illness narratives in an age of staged authenticity: A story-critical approach to cancer influencers’ sharing

Giaxoglou, K. and Nao, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6300-4867 2025. Illness narratives in an age of staged authenticity: A story-critical approach to cancer influencers’ sharing. Presented at: Health and science communication: Inequalities, inclusion and innovation, Lancaster, UK, 25 March 2025.

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Abstract

Illness narratives have been gaining public visibility on many social media platforms e.g., Instagram and Tik Tok, garnering large online audiences and creating a new type of influencer: the ‘cancer influencer’. This category refers to social media users with large audience followings of more than 10,000, who are undergoing – or have received – treatment for cancer and who use their platform profiles as sites for sharing their illness narrative as well as for awareness-raising. This ‘cancer storytelling boom’ attests to the broader contemporary mobilisation of storytelling for a range of purposes, including self-branding, which has prompted story-critical approaches (Mäkelä and Meretoja, 2022). Although recent research has brought to the fore key aspects of narrativity and affectivity that cancer influencers draw upon (e.g. Stage et al., 2020), little critical attention has been paid, so far, to the uptake of these narrative performances by cancer patients and survivors. In this paper, we present the first stages of our Open Societal Challenges project, in which we set out to explore the implications of this cancer ‘storytelling boom’ on the mental health and wellbeing of cancer patients and survivors. Applying critical narrative and affective positioning concepts analysis in select examples of cancer influencers (Giaxoglou, 2021), we document and scrutinise the practices that characterise these modes of sharing and we then examine cancer patients’ views and reactions to these. Our aims are to show (a) how illness, and specifically cancer, is mobilised as a resource for staging ‘the real’, conventionalising illness identity and affective positionings, and (b) to explore the extent to which the circulation of these narratives and positionings has a negative impact on the wellbeing of cancer patients and survivors. Our paper contributes to the critical study of illness narratives across online and offline practices of health-related communication.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item - unpublished
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2026 09:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189623

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