Despite Mary Deshazer’s affirmation that “living with cancer has become the topic of our times” (2005, 1), some cancers are still covered by a blanket of secrecy. This paper discusses Susan Gubar’s ...and Eve Ensler’s autopathographies about gynecological cancer in relation to silence. It explores their discussion of the possibility of finding words for their illness and their reflection about the unspeakability of the sick female body, concluding that they construct silence as undesirable and ineffective.
Dama contra peón: la genialidad femenina en Gambito de dama Menéndez-Menéndez, María-Isabel; Fernández-Morales, Marta
Revista mediterránea de comunicación/Revista mediterránea de comunicación,
01/2023, Volume:
14, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
La miniserie Gambito de dama, protagonizada por una ajedrecista huérfana, con problemas emocionales y dependencia de los fármacos y el alcohol, fue la ficción más vista en la historia de la ...plataforma Netflix en 2020. En este artículo se realiza un análisis feminista de ella mediante un enfoque interpretativo y una metodología cualitativa, con el objetivo de dilucidar hasta qué punto la serie rompe con el paradigma mainstream de representación femenina, caracterizado por la estereotipia sexista, el énfasis en el cuerpo y la belleza o la instrumentalización de la violencia sexual. El estudio revelará que esta ficción brinda una heroína imperfecta, que rompe estereotipos de género, aunque no exenta de algunos problemas, como la descripción de la genialidad, a caballo entre el patrón masculino y el extravío mental estereotípicamente femenino.
During the spring of 2020, literary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were quick to appear. Poetry, essays and diaries proliferated, and collective initiatives sprang up, with authors delving into a ...crisis that was national as well as global; political as well as health-based. In their lockdown works, US-based authors tackled their experience in the context of the country, chronicling the virus alongside inequality, racism and environmental challenges. Sheltering in place on either side of the Continental Divide, Pam Houston and Amy Irvine maintained an intense correspondence that was later published as Air Mail. Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place, which this article approaches as representative of ecofeminist COVID literature. It tracks their epistolary journey from the self to the social and back, discussing their narrative of the pandemic within the framework of their shared stance. Their letters are read as heirs to second-wave feminism and analysed as one instance of the current permeation of ecofeminist theories, specifically the material perspective. Through the study of Houston and Irvine's correspondence, this article aims to illuminate the cultural work done by American ecofeminist writers during an extraordinary period.
This book explores popular culture representations of gender, offering a rich and accessible discussion of masculinities and femininities in 21st-century popular media. It brings together ...contributors from various European countries to investigate the workings of gender in contemporary pop culture products in a brave, original, and rigorous way. This volume is both an academic proposal and an exercise of commitment to a serious analysis of some of the media that influence us most in our everyday lives. Representation matters, and the position we take as viewers or consumers during reception matters even more.
The life-writing genre, and more specifically the memoir subgenre, are fertile ground for survivors of sexual violence wanting to share their plight and/or to raise awareness about rape. Chanel ...Miller is an Asian American artist educated in California. In 2015 she attended a Stanford campus party and was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a White undergraduate student and athlete. Four years later, she wrote a memoir about her experience entitled Know My Name.
Building on previous works on Miller's text from the field of trauma studies, and acknowledging the memory turn in life-writing scholarship, this article tackles the dialectic between the presence and absence of memories in the narrative, and the gendered implications of this dialectic. It analyses how the book critically exposes the workings of rape culture and illustrates how Miller creates a counternarrative where the absence of memories of the rape triggers alternative narratisation strategies. I argue that Miller activates an authoritative voice that can be inserted in the feminist tradition of life writing, while at the same time building an alternative frame of justice that stems from the author-reader relationship rather than from a particular understanding of the law.
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is the most common complication of cardiac surgery. Cardiac surgery-associated AKI (CSA-AKI) is caused by systemic and renal hemodynamic impairment and parenchymal injury. ...Prophylaxis of CSA-AKI remains an unmet priority, for which preventive strategies based on drug therapies, hydration procedures, and remote ischemic preconditioning (RIPC) have been tested in pre-clinical and clinical studies, with variable success. Contradicting reports and scarce or insufficiently pondered information have blurred conclusions. Therefore, with an aim to contribute to consolidating the available information, we carried out a wide scope, pan-comparative meta-analysis including the accessible information about the most relevant nephroprotective approaches assayed. After a thorough examination of 1892 documents retrieved from PubMed and Web of Science, 150 studies were used for the meta-analysis. Individual odds ratios of efficacy at reducing AKI incidence, need for dialysis, and plasma creatinine elevation were obtained for each alleged protectant. Also, the combined class effect of drug families and protective strategies was also meta-analyzed. Our results show that no drug family or procedure affords substantial protection against CSA-AKI. Only, a mild but significant reduction in the incidence of CSA-AKI by preemptive treatment with dopaminergic and adrenergic drugs, vasodilators, and the RIPC technique. The integrated analysis suggests that single-drug approaches are unlikely to cope with the variety of individual pathophysiological scenarios potentially underlying CSA-AKI. Accordingly, a theragnostic approach involving the etiopathological diagnosis of kidney frailty is necessary to guide research towards the development of pharmacological combinations concomitantly and effectively addressing the key mechanisms of CSA-AKI.
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•Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common complication of cardiac surgery and a bad prognosis factor.•Prophylactic interventions are needed to improve patient outcome.•Preemptive application of specific drugs or remote ischemic preconditioning affords only mild protection.•Cardiac surgery-associated AKI etiopathology is complex and multifactorial.•Combined prophylaxis concomitantly tackling key pathological mechanisms should be tested.
In the context of a new wave of women’s activism for equality, the body is once again at the centre of the discussion today, in the USA and globally. Analysing American discourses about health and ...illness at the turn of the twenty-first century, Tasha Dubriwny has argued that the current narratives are dominated by neoliberal and postfeminist philosophies that have thrived in a framework of biomedicalisation and self-surveillance. What happens, then, when a successful feminist artist is diagnosed with uterine cancer? How does Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, face the fact that her life may have a painful ending? How does a woman so aware of her physical and psychological self come to terms with illness? Is she willing to put her political project aside to become a patient? Through a close reading of Ensler’s uterine cancer memoir In the Body of the World, and focusing particularly on its structure and narrative strategies, this article situates her work within the corpus of female literature about health and illness in the twenty-first century, exploring her meaning-making process in the light of the current tensions between feminism and postfeminism.
In 1993, The New York Times Magazine published a story entitled 'The anguished politics of breast cancer.' The image on the cover was a self-portrait of artist and model Matuschka showing the ...physical consequences of a radical mastectomy. The picture elicited heated reactions, and the protagonist became an icon of the Women's Health Movement. Twelve years later, another model and photographer, Lynn Kohlman, published Front to back, which included portraits of her body after treatments for breast and brain cancer. Although free of the marks of pink ribbon culture, Kohlman's work was framed within the dominant discourse of breast cancer in the twenty-first century, characterized by individualism, positive thinking, and the idea of consumer's choice. This paper discusses Matuschka's and Kohlman's cancer photography within a comparative diachronic framework, focusing on the turn-of-the-century politics of representation. We argue that, despite their common traits, their respective productions are signs of a radical shift in the cultural paradigm of breast cancer. Through an analysis of the studium of their photographs and the preferred meaning that they suggest, we conclude that Matuschka's project feeds into the feminist battle for equity in health initiated by the early Breast Cancer Movement, whereas Kohlman's strengthens the postfeminist stance that is prevalent in the current panorama of neoliberal capitalism.
Neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs) are mutationally quiet (low number of mutations/Mb), and epigenetic mechanisms drive their development and progression. We aimed at comprehensively characterising the ...microRNA (miRNA) profile of NENs, and exploring downstream targets and their epigenetic modulation. In total, 84 cancer‐related miRNAs were analysed in 85 NEN samples from lung and gastroenteropancreatic (GEP) origin, and their prognostic value was evaluated by univariate and multivariate models. Transcriptomics (N = 63) and methylomics (N = 30) were performed to predict miRNA target genes, signalling pathways and regulatory CpG sites. Findings were validated in The Cancer Genome Atlas cohorts and in NEN cell lines. We identified a signature of eight miRNAs that stratified patients in three prognostic groups (5‐year survival of 80%, 66% and 36%). Expression of the eight‐miRNA gene signature correlated with 71 target genes involved in PI3K–Akt and TNFα–NF‐kB signalling. Of these, 28 were associated with survival and validated in silico and in vitro. Finally, we identified five CpG sites involved in the epigenetic regulation of these eight miRNAs. In brief, we identified an 8‐miRNA signature able to predict survival of patients with GEP and lung NENs, and identified genes and regulatory mechanisms driving prognosis in NEN patients.
The comprehensive characterisation of microRNA (miRNA) profiles of neuroendocrine neoplasms has identified an eight‐miRNA signature able to stratify patients into three prognostic groups. Transcriptomic data have shown that these miRNAs are associated with genes involved in PI3K–Akt and TNFα–NF‐kB signalling. Finally, we have identified five CpG sites involved in the epigenetic regulation of these eight miRNAs.
Abstract
The objective of this study was to analyse the mechanisms of resistance to carbapenems and other extended-spectrum-β-lactams and to determine the genetic relatedness of multidrug-resistant
...Enterobacterales
(MDR-E) causing colonization or infection in solid-organ transplantation (SOT) recipients. Prospective cohort study in kidney (n = 142), liver (n = 98) or kidney/pancreas (n = 7) transplant recipients between 2014 and 2018 in seven Spanish hospitals. We included 531 MDR-E isolates from rectal swabs obtained before transplantation and weekly for 4–6 weeks after the procedure and 10 MDR-E from clinical samples related to an infection. Overall, 46.2%
Escherichia coli
, 35.3%
Klebsiella pneumoniae
, 6.5%
Enterobacter cloacae
, 6.3%
Citrobacter freundii
and 5.7% other species were isolated. The number of patients with MDR-E colonization post-transplantation (176; 71.3%) was 2.5-fold the number of patients colonized pre-transplantation (71; 28.7%). Extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs) and carbapenemases were detected in 78.0% and 21.1% of MDR-E isolates respectively. In nine of the 247 (3.6%) transplant patients, the microorganism causing an infection was the same strain previously cultured from surveillance rectal swabs. In our study we have observed a low rate of MDR-E infection in colonized patients 4–6 weeks post-transplantation.
E. coli
producing
bla
CTX-M-G1
and
K. pneumoniae
harbouring
bla
OXA-48
alone or with
bla
CTX-M-G1
were the most prevalent MDR-E colonization strains in SOT recipients.
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