Gender & Society, January 2026
For decades, breast cancer survivors organized to demand public awareness, better research, and more effective treatment. Their embodied activism, grounded in lived experiences, arose in part from second-wave feminism and led to real gains. Today, though, that activism is shifting into new spaces: private online groups where survivors and “previvors” (those with heightened genetic risks but to-date cancer-free) connect, support each other, and share alternative knowledge.
Linda Blum and KJ Surkan’s study of individuals with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC) mutations—such as BRCA1 and BRCA2—shows how these online spaces offer both promise and peril for feminism and for other social movements in a digital age. The project grew out of KJ Surkan’s embodied activist or “BRCActivist” experiences and our several semesters of coteaching feminist methodologies. We interviewed participants diverse in racial-ethnic, sexual, and gender identities at two points during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time provoking a lasting surge in social media use; and a time in which many survivors and previvors faced deferred treatment or care that added to their anxieties on top of anxieties about COVID. We found that these communities fostered deep empathy and the building of experiential knowledge, which are invaluable resources that medical professionals cannot always address with those facing those with cancer risk.
