Chemo patients don't owe you their suffering
not even the Princess of Wales, sorry! A short rant
The Anne Helen Petersen-Sara Petersen newsletter “critiquing” the media narrative around Kate Middleton’s post-chemo emergence is the most inane drivel positioned and sold to nearly 100,000 readers as “cultural analysis,” oh my god.
Every cancer patient I’ve spoken with, regardless of background, has a more complex, dynamic, and ultimately helpful interrogation of Middleton’s video1 (or they literally just don’t care!!) than these two healthy, well-resourced white ladies. They took it on Virginia Sole Smith’s word2 that they weren’t critiquing Middleton’s cancer but instead “the narrative around it,” when truly nothing in this glorified text message thread they’ve managed to convince thousands of people to pay for indicates they understand anything about the motivations of patient or cultural narratives around illness at all.
Oh, you’re mad, because Middleton looks pretty and didn’t perform her suffering in the public view? You’re upset because her kids are happy in the video and they didn’t talk about her husband’s affair!? It’s rich, truly, to have women who are obsessed with maintaining standards of normative3 health and family life in their own lives make money off of these pat complaints about Middleton because “monarchy.” Lol. Do the Petersens (and Sole Smith, for that matter) not understand that most women who are drowning in debt from cancer treatment actually see very little material difference between the contours and successes of these “critics” lives’ and the royal family’s? One of them is running marathons in her 40s and living off a Substack newsletter. The other gets to write about momfluencers as a way to think through her own participation in and capitulation to the nuclear family, her mom-obsession with Babaa sweaters, and makes a living off feminism-lite vis-à-vis missives about Ballerina Farm.
Maybe it would have been helpful for them to actually seek out a 30- or 40-something-year-old woman who has a meaningful perspective on the challenges, joys, and desires of raising kids while surviving (or dying of) cancer during late-stage capitalism?
That they can gleefully go off about the brands Christy Dawn and Rudy Jude positions them more closely to Middleton than it does any of the women that I work with who are struggling to figure out how to love their bodies, enjoy their families, and see themselves as beautiful in the face of mortal illness. Christy Dawn makes a great and comfortable dress that also allows access to a chemo port, tbh. If I could buy Christy Dawn dresses for every young woman I see across from me in the chemo pavilion, I fucking would. Just saying.
The Petersens’ obsession with Middleton’s performance of natural health, the “ideal mother,” and the white nuclear family says so much more about these “cultural commentators” than it does anything useful about culture.
TLDR; I am alarmed and grossed out by the relish with which a certain white professional-managerial/upper-middle-class writer engages in gossip about other wealthy white women’s lives as a way to amass 1) writerly clout, a 2) parasocial following of other similarly positioned women unhappy with their lives and yet obsessed with sublimating that unhappiness into literally the most superficial and circumspect “progressive” critique of culture, and 3) avoid any actual examination of how they are contributing to the very problems of feminism, discourse, the gendered body they pretend to care about.
At some point, as readers, we have to ask ourselves why we are participating in this, spending money on it, relishing it ourselves.
I have my own response to the video, as a pregnant woman with terminal cancer. I’ll write about that reaction more thoughtfully in a later essay.
“As our friend Virginia put it, ‘you aren’t critiquing her cancer, you’re critiquing how the royal family is marketing her cancer survivorhood as ideal mother trope.’ … I’m all here for critiques of the ideal mother trope but you literally cannot do that if you do not understand or engage with the complexities of how ideality shifts, rhetorically and ontologically, in the face of mortal illness.
but, like, in a “leftist” way!
I was really shocked when I opened that letter this morning (I pay for that newsletter -- not any longer!). Viscerally disgusted.
I definitely had my own reaction to the video, but agree that I’m shocked at the flippancy of AHP’s tone here. Even just the editorial choice to make it a very casual (and gossipy) back and forth between two seemingly able bodied women is…a gross choice. And totally agree that Virginia Sole Smith (whose work I often enjoy) shouldn’t get to just say it’s fine for them to say whatever however they want since it’s about “the narrative.” I don’t think any of those three women have been hooked up to machines to poison themselves to stay alive so..I don’t think they really get a say?