Entre déjà-dit et jamais-dit. Cancers rares et quêtes d’autorité numérique

Abstract

This paper aims to question the « parent expert » notion, through an analysis of web discourses which focus on a very specific type of cancer: glioblastoma. It is a rare brain cancer more than often diagnosed at a late stage, with a very poor prognosis and huge and disabling neurological impairments at the time of identification of the disease. Thereby, when a web patient chat room happens to deal with glioblastoma, the discussion happens most of the time between close relatives. Therefore, this paper deals with the following questions: how do these discourses show the parents’ building of authority? To what extent is their on-line quest for authority also a try to free themselves from the medical « already-said », by requesting a kind of « never-said »? Through the semio-communicational analysis of a specific corpus of web forums, the paper underlines how parents position themselves relative to other actors and how they produce their own « authorization process ».

Keywords

• authority
• cancer
• forum
• parent
• testimony