Julie Mengert is Collegiate Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech.
Metavivors are people living with—and dying from—metastatic breast cancer. Metaphors of war and survival, still dominant in breast-cancer discourse, are, if they are useful to anyone, not, in general, useful to them. Indeed, they may be harmful. Mengert engages with these metaphors, and, with nuance and care, goes beyond them to explore questions of breast-cancer rhetoric more broadly—what it is and what it can be: When, as happens increasingly, cancer becomes a chronic illness, how do we speak of it and why does that matter? * Judy Z. Segal, Professor Emerita, University of British Columbia, Canada *