Jenny Slatman

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. (1) While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. (2) While ‘being there for you’, partners take care of each other in mutually dependent ways. (3) While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners (re-)relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. (4) While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer.

This article examines how contemporary domestic noir fiction and its online reception relate to the pathologization of women’s testimony. Combining feminist narratology, critical phenomenology, and Ian Hacking’s concept of “making up people,” we analyze Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window alongside Goodreads reviews of both novels. We argue that these texts mobilize women’s psychological distress—addiction, agoraphobia, depression, trauma, and gaslighting—as sources of narrative suspense while simultaneously casting doubt on women’s credibility as witnesses to their own experiences. Drawing on a thematically coded corpus of Goodreads reviews, we identify a spectrum of reader responses, ranging from diagnostic and moralizing readings that reproduce testimonial injustice to empathic and feminist readings that challenge pathologizing assumptions. By bringing textual analysis and reader-response research into dialogue, the article demonstrates that the credibility of female narrators is not determined by narrative form alone but is negotiated through broader cultural assumptions about women’s reliability and authority. Domestic noir thus emerges as a key site where women’s suffering becomes a contested object of interpretation in contemporary reading culture.

Body awareness is considered to be an important element of mindfulness-based interventions. Although studies have been done on the effects of enhanced body awareness on health and well-being, none of these studies focused on the meaning of the body and body awareness in the teaching and learning process of enhancing one’s body awareness. In this paper, we provide a phenomenology of the body in the practice of a mindfulness-based intervention. We present a participant observation study about an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) training. We analyzed, by taking a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, what enhancing one’s body awareness entails in this practice, and how participants experienced their bodies in this process. We identified four ways in which the body (not) appears in MBSR: as intermittently present, as fragmented, while ‘feeling good’, and while ‘not feeling good’. We discussed how these body appearances can be understood through the analytic lens of Leder’s disappearance and dys-appearance, and Zeiler’s eu-appearance, and with Van Manen’s phenomenological distinctions of the body. At the end of this paper, we considered how our findings may cast new light on one of the central tenets in mindfulness practice: to be non-judgmentally aware in the present moment.