Cancer can kill: this fact makes it concrete. Still, it’s a devious knave. Nearly every American will experience it up-close and all too personally, wondering why the billions of research dollars thrown at the word haven’t exterminated it from the English language.

Like a sapper diffusing a bomb, Jain unscrambles the emotional, bureaucratic, medical, and scientific tropes that create the thing we call cancer.

Scientists debate even the most basic facts about the disease, while endlessly generated, disputed, population data produce the appearance of knowledge.

Jain takes the vacuum at the center of cancer seriously and demonstrates the need to understand cancer as a set of relationships—economic, sentimental, medical, personal, ethical, institutional, statistical.

Malignant analyzes the peculiar authority of the socio-sexual psychopathologies of body parts; the uneven effects of expertise and power; the potentially cancerous consequences of medical procedures such as IVF; the huge industrial investments that manifest themselves as bone-cold testing rooms; the legal mess of medical malpractice law; and the teeth-grittingly jovial efforts to smear makeup and wigs over the whole messy problem of bodies spiraling into pain and decay.

Malignant examines the painful cognitive dissonances produced by the ways a culture that has relished dazzling success in every conceivable arena have twisted one of its staunchest failures into an economic triumph. The intractable foil to American achievement, cancer hands us -- on a silver platter and ready for Jain’s incisively original dissection -- our sacrifice to the American Dream.

S. Lochlann Jain is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and author of Injury: Design and Litigation in the United States.

"Dr. Jain's unique perspective on cancer -- blending her personal experience with her training as ethnographer and anthropologist -- results in a memorable exploration of what malignancy means in our culture. I found myself entertained, informed, surprised and ultimately transformed by this wonderful narrative." —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

"How is it possible, S. Lochlann Jain asks in this moving, brutally honest book, for cancer to “be inside so many people and remain outside of society.” This is a searing personal and political exploration of how important it is to make cancer a public issue. And it helps us to understand how and why government, corporate, and military leaders are so reluctant to do so. Malignant is also a clarion call for how crucial it is that we as a society finally do the research to uncover the connections between environmental toxins and cancer."—Gerald Moskowitz, co-author of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children

"Malignant is an idiosyncratic, irreverent, and probing mash up of cancer in the U.S. today. It is both extremely personal and highly analytic. Jain peels away layer after layer of certainty. The cancer that emerges is untidy, more a set of relationships than a thing. Cancer is refracted through personal experience, body parts, sexuality, laws, regulations, profits, epidemiology, and environmental damage. While highly critical of standard claims to authority and expert knowledge, suppressed politics, misplaced priorities, and victim blaming, Jain retains empathy and humor. She writes out of sorrow and anger, but strives to understand and communicate. Malignant makes visible the suppressed politics in cancer’s causes, research, and care, and calls for more inclusion and political engagement."—Robert Aronowitz, MD, author of Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society

"In this alternately galvanizing and moving report from the bowels of the 'cancer complex' in the US, Jain offers both a queer patient's eye view and an astute scholar's analysis of the creation and treatment of disease as a business practice and a way of life. Written at the complex crossroads of queer and disability studies, medical anthropology and memoir, Malignant extends the scholarship and activism surrounding HIV/AIDS to alert us that, in the case of cancer, ubiquity=death."—Lisa Duggan, American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, NYU

"Lochlann Jain is the rare academic whose writing is as beautiful as her ideas."—Carl Elliott, author of Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream

"Drawing from history, her own personal journey with cancer, and evidence about how powerful political and economic interests have shaped the public discourse about cancer, Jain eloquently explores this complex world of causation, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and healing that has touched us all. Because she draws upon some of the best feminist literature addressing the topic of cancer and uses her own experience as an egg donor as an example of how we fail to collect adequate data to guide our personal decision-making, this book will be especially valuable for all those interested in women, health and the environment."—Judy Norsigian, Executive Director, Our Bodies Ourselves

Visit S. Lochlann Jain's webpage

Read S. Lochlann Jain's articles at the Huffington Post