Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Medical Humanities https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-021-09711-4 1 3 Abject Ontologies: Cancer and ‘Living On’ Nadine Ehlers 1  · Shiloh Krupar 2 Accepted: 7 June 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract This paper examines cancer through the lens of abjection. While cancer can be understood as an abject lifeform, we explore what we name the abject ontologies created through both cancer detection technologies/practices and cancer treatment, specifcally the drug combi- nation Adriamycin and Cytoxan. We ask: what are the abject ontologies produced through living with and living on from cancer diagnosis and treatment? Our concern is to map how cancer undoes our supposedly stable categories inherited from modernist logic, challenges our very ideas of what it means to be human, and demands an ethical reorientation of pub- lic cancer discourse. Keywords Cancer · abjection · ontology · corporeality · biomedicine In October 2009, monstrous pink blobs invaded the streets of Auckland, New Zealand. Part of the global public awareness campaign of ‘Breast Cancer Action Month,’ bulbous veiny street-art tumors were installed in commercial areas—moving, undulating, and metastasiz- ing through the city streets. Drawing on B-movie horror conventions, namely the iconic amorphous ball of gelatinous pink goo that frst made its appearance on the silver screen in 1958 battling against Steve McQueen in his debut leading role, ‘the blob’ returns as the monstrous threat of breast cancer, oozing around town, squeezing through the cracks, and overtaking unsuspecting people, and growing horrifcally with every symbolic victim of the disease. The onslaught of this disembodied breast-cancer blob was not introduced to earth by a crashed meteorite or covert government experiment but by the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation and designer Colenso BBDO. Rampaging through the city, engulf- ing space, blocking sidewalks, and terrifying bystanders with giant veins and its seem- ingly gelatinous mass, the wobbling, unpleasantly-feshy-looking blob signifes breast cancer’s slow but persistent encroachment on everyday life, metastasizing even inside the family and home. To mark this possibility, the blob simultaneously debuted in a tel- evision commercial depicting the lives of a ‘normal’ New Zealand family; the ‘elephant in the room,’ the blob grows and flls every nook and cranny of the house, displacing * Nadine Ehlers nadine.ehlers@sydney.edu.au 1 Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia 2 Culture and Politics Program, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA