This essay examines the “dirty margins” where HIV/AIDS, cancer, and academic life intersect. Drawing on Paula Treichler’s concept of AIDS as an “epidemic of signification,” it traces forty years of living with HIV, including a near-fatal episode of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) in 1994 and over a decade of anal dysplasia—conditions rendered culturally legible through AIDS-era moral panic as much as through oncology. I write as autopathography, treating autobiography not as confession but as method, following Arthur W. Frank’s understanding of pathography as knowledge produced from embodied experience. Although KS did not recur, its long shadow shaped the temporal and affective terrain of survival. Moving from the whispered moralization of illness to the clinic’s production of the clinical self—the version of the body produced in medical records, and from academic domestication and erotic counterpractices to quantification, pharmacological society, and the social mirror, the essay traces how a misbehaving body is repeatedly threatened, written down, fragmented, managed, and measured—yet continues to theorize back. In these processes, minoritized bodies become hypervisible as research objects yet remain marginal as knowledge producers. Against triumphant scripts of biomedical progress, the essay assembles a counterarchive of resentment, erotic improvisation, and delayed care. The “dirty margins” of cancer, it argues, reside not only in diseased cells but also in the epistemic and institutional systems that metabolize marginalized bodies as spectacle, evidence, and compliance while refusing their authority as theory.

Cancer is often viewed as a spectacular event, a “state of exception,” which overshadows its impact on the mundane realities of professional life, particularly academic work. This paper moves beyond viewing cancer solely through its “terminations” (treatment end, death, and job loss) to explore its relationship with academic labour. Drawing on published narratives of women academics across India who live with, survive, or care for others with cancer, we analyse the “affective circuits” that are non-individual and flow through their bodies, objects, and relations. We examine how cancer endures as a material and cultural force, shaping normative expectations of optimism, survival, and productivity within academia. The first-person accounts published as autobiographies, autoethnographies, and autopathographies provide access to non-normative emotions and position cancer as a contested site of labour. As women academics who interface with these experiences, we investigate how living with and alongside cancer disrupts the normative expectations and everyday routines of teaching, thinking, and writing. This paper critically explores the intersection between cancer and the disciplinary subjectivities of women academics in India, arguing that the experience of cancer is not just a personal health challenge but a profound, structural force that shapes and is shaped by their academic labour.

For most of my scholarly life, I have studied subjectivity—insisting, through the method of currere, that education is less a noun than an infinitive, an ongoing existential undertaking. In this brief reflection, I turn that longstanding preoccupation toward my own experience of cancer treatment. What I discovered, and what startled me, was not simply illness but the gradual substitution of symptomology for subjectivity: the displacement of inner life by the management of bodily events. At a moment when this themed issue invites minoritized scholars to write from cancer’s dirty margins, I find myself confronting a different marginalization—the quiet eclipse of the self by the clinical accounting of its symptoms. This essay provides glimpses of that substitution and asks what remains of subjectivity when the body becomes an inventory of side effects.

Cancer narratives matter! This paper explores Te Whare Tapa Whā, a holistic Indigenous Māori model of health and well-being and its application to my personal narrative after being diagnosed with advanced, stage 3 high-grade serous ovarian cancer. Te Whare Tapa Whā was developed by Māori psychiatrist and academic Sir Mason Durie (ONZ KNZM FRANZCP). It compares hauora (holistic health and well-being) to the four walls of a whare (house), all four being necessary to ensure strength and symmetry, though each represents a different dimension: taha wairua (spiritual health), taha hinengaro (mental and emotional health), taha tinana (physical health), and taha whānau (family and social health). There is also a fifth element to the model, taha whenua, the land and our connections to place. Each aspect of Te Whare Tapa Whā was integral to my recovery and cancer survivorship. This paper discusses those aspects and how cancer patients can utilize this model to support themselves throughout the challenges of a cancer diagnosis and the often arduous and lengthy journey of recovery.

This essay examines how advanced ovarian cancer is represented in two American texts written by scholarly women: Susan Gubar’s Memoir of a Debulked Woman (2012) and Margaret Edson’s play Wit (1995). It asks how autobiography and drama, two distinct narrative modes, articulate bodily vulnerability, medical authority, and the politics of care in the contemporary hospital. Drawing on pathography studies, autothanatography, and the critical medical humanities, the essay argues that reading these works together reveals how illness is not merely a biological event, but an experience shaped by gendered assumptions, institutional power, linguistic hierarchies, and national welfare structures. The first part analyzes how both texts stage anger, fear of death, and the erosion of intellectual mastery. The second part situates these representations within the framework of the critical medical humanities, examining dehumanizing research protocols, the medical gaze, failures of communication, end-of-life ethics, employment precarity, and the gendered construction of ovarian cancer. Ultimately, the essay contends that these pathographies expose the systemic failures of contemporary ovarian cancer treatment while reclaiming the ill female body as a speaking, interpretive subject. By placing memoir and drama in dialogue, the article demonstrates how literary form itself becomes a site of resistance against biomedical reductionism.

Pathographies of cancer illuminate what biomedical discourse overlooks. Minoritized scholars illustrate how bodies and knowledges at the margins are both cared for and silenced. As a gay academic who came of age during the AIDS epidemic and now lives with Stage 4 metastatic cancer, I write from oncology’s “dirty margins”: outside cure and within institutions where marginality has long shaped my labor and leadership. I examine how sexuality, pleasure, and ambiguous grieving intersect with advanced cancer, and how these embodied knowledges can queer and crip the clinic. By foregrounding erotic life, loss, and resilience in an autopathography, my narrative praises exemplary care while critiquing medicine’s discomfort with ambiguity. Methodologically, I draw on autobiographical reflection informed by queer theory, poststructuralist feminism, and crip theory to explore three sites: the erotic body as an archive of vitality and ambiguous loss; insider–outsider tensions across academy and clinic; and a shift from seeking positional authority to being—servant leadership and pedagogical legacy. In this minoritized pathography, I explore tensions between gratitude and critique as a generative queer gesture. Offering praise while unsettling biomedical silences queers the binary of “good” versus “bad” care. For biomedicine, this entails greater tolerance of ambiguity and integration of sexuality and grieving into care; for the humanities, recognition of embodied, erotic, minoritized knowledges as central to reimagining illness and work. Ultimately, such narratives transform suffering into meaning, legacy, and pedagogy—acts of queer resistance that teach how to live and die with authenticity and love.

This article engages health humanities scholarship that approaches biomedical knowledge as cultural and pedagogical, and that treats patient experience, clinician reports, medical images, and other quotidian patient and/or health-provider texts as interpretive sites. This work fleshes out the intelligibility of patient voices as constitutive of a cartography of presence. Drawing on queer theory and the onco-humanities, I argue that clinical cancer settings operate through choreographies that both organize bodies and feature tactical refusals. Autobiographical experience rendered as pathography—often dismissed as anecdotal—is approached here as research evidence and as animating practices of resistance within regimes of biomedical authority. Methodologically, the article juxtaposes close readings of two sets of artifacts: (1) Tactic, the first widely broadcast cancer-focused educational television series (produced by the American Cancer Society and NBC) and (2) a hauntological archive summoned from my 2025 to 2026 Stage IV lung cancer documents; a constellation of clinical and autobiographical traces—fieldnotes, clinical care-provider reports, and medical images. Read together, these materials reveal how cancer—reimagined as an “epidemic of signification”—has long functioned as a pedagogical project aimed at managing uncertainty, disciplining affect, and sustaining optimism as a mode of governance. By placing a contemporary patient-curated archive in dialogue with mid-century public cancer pedagogy, the article traces queer pedagogical practices that rewrite the normative from cancer’s margins. It advances the concept of tactical choreographies to name how cancer patients inhabit, reroute, and on occasion, refuse the pedagogical demands of medicine under conditions of institutional invisibility, necropolitical abjection, and state violence.

This article provides a narrative review of the inspiration, design and implementation of a Stanford Medical School course titled “From Diagnosis to Dialog: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle with Cancer.” In 2024, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer as a never-smoker. Within a month of diagnosis, I designed a course based on my own case in which each session begins with a personal reflection, followed by a guest speaker or panel discussion and concluding conversation with students. The curriculum addresses medical topics including epidemiology, treatment and the future of cancer care while centering the lived realities of diagnosis, mortality, access to care, nutrition, spiritual care, mental health and caregiving. This pedagogical project foregrounds a first-person pathography that situates the perspectives of Asian patients and physicians within broader conversations about cancer narratives that often remain at the margins of biomedical education. The article highlights several themes emerging from the course related to the Asian experience and Asian health, and concludes with reflections on feedback from students and viewers who engaged with the publicly available YouTube recordings of the course.