Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature

Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature

by Mary K. DeShazer
Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature

Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature

by Mary K. DeShazer

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Overview

Women have been writing about cancer for decades, but since the early 1990s, the body of literature on cancer has increased exponentially as growing numbers of women face the searing realities of the disease and give testimony to its ravages and revelations.

Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature surveys a wide range of contemporary writing about breast, uterine, and ovarian cancer, including works by Marilyn Hacker, Margaret Edson, Carole Maso, Audre Lorde, Eve Sedgwick, Mahasweta Devi, Lucille Clifton, Alicia Ostriker, Jayne Anne Phillips, Terry Tempest Williams, and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. DeShazer's readings bring insights from body theory, performance theory, feminist literary criticism, French feminisms, and disability studies to bear on these works, shining new light on a literary subject that is engaging more and more writers.

"An important and useful book that will appeal to people in a variety of fields and walks of life, including scholars, teachers, and anyone interested in this subject."
--Suzanne Poirier, University of Illinois at Chicago

"A book on a timely and important topic, wisely written beyond scholarly boundaries and crossing many theoretical and disciplinary lines."
--Patricia Moran, University of California, Davis

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780472024681
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publication date: 02/05/2010
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 312
File size: 400 KB

About the Author

Mary DeShazer is Professor of Women's Studies and English, Wake Forest University. She is editor of The Longman Anthology of Women's Literature and author of A Poetics of Resistance: Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States and Inspiring Women: Reimagining the Muse.

Read an Excerpt

FRACTURED BORDERS

Reading Women's Cancer Literature
By Mary K. DeShazer

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2005 University of Michigan
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-09909-2


Chapter One

"THE NIGHT-SIDE OF LIFE"

Analyzing Cancer Literature from Feminist Perspectives

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. -Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use. I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined. -Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

In Illness as Metaphor (1977) THE U.S. PHILOSOPHER Susan Sontag examines the traumatic and transformational power of life-threatening diseases, which force the humans who contract them to face "the night-side of life" (1). Specifically, she compares the nineteenth-century quest to eliminate tuberculosis with the twentieth-century effort to eradicate cancer and discusses the ways in which bothdiseases are "spectacularly, and similarly, encumbered by the trappings of metaphor" (5). TB and cancer evoke dread and fear of contagion, she explains; physicians typically describe these diseases as consuming, corrupting, insidious, and invasive, while the culture at large finds them unspeakable, monstrous. For cancer patients, portrayed until recently in life and in literature as "humiliated by fear and agony," such metaphors may evoke terror and self-blame; certainly "the people who have the real disease are hardly helped by hearing their disease's name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil" (17, 84). If cancer can be stripped of negative metaphors and "demythicized," Sontag concludes, ill people will stand a better chance of avoiding stigmatization and addressing cancer on their own terms (86-87).

In The Cancer Journals (1980) Audre Lorde challenges, from African American and lesbian feminist perspectives, the silences that patriarchal cultures have demanded of women with cancer. Dedicated to "the trans-formation of silence into language and action," Lorde eloquently describes her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy as well as her refusal to wear a "grotesquely pale" prosthesis and thereby conform to societal expectations regarding white normativity and sym-metrical breasts (18, 44). Although she acknowledges the suffering her illness causes, she refuses to find it humiliating. Instead she determines to mine "whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience," a strength she taps by reflecting honestly on what it means to be a "post-mastectomy woman"-black, lesbian, and resistant (1).

While both of these pioneers in the area of women's cancer literature decry the silence and shaming that cancer patients in the late 1970s typically confronted, they differ in their feminist perspectives and thus in their approach to theorizing cancer. In her interrogation of the ways in which militaristic and demonizing metaphors work to stigmatize people living with cancer, Sontag's emphasis is discursive; cultural attitudes toward this disease will shift, she argues, once patients refuse to view their cancerous bodies as "out of control" and physicians abandon their "military rhetoric" in favor of "metaphors featuring the body's 'natural defenses'" (11, 66, 87). Lorde's emphasis is activist; she uses feminist standpoint theory to argue that gender, race, sexual orientation, and other categories of identity and difference are shifting, intersecting, and multiply mediated axes from which one can, with validity, undertake cultural analysis and intervention. Unlike Sontag, who downplays gender, mentions ethnicity only in the context of Nazi disease tropes, and does not acknowledge her own breast cancer, Lorde theorizes directly from her own gendered, racially specific, and embodied experience of illness and recovery. While Sontag locates her narrative authority in philosophy, Lorde locates hers in identity politics. To be sure, these theorists share the sociopolitical goal of destigmatizing cancer and shedding light on how contemporary culture constructs this disease as humiliating. However, each writer has contributed different insights to contemporary feminist understandings of cancer, women's bodies, and representation.

The writings of Sontag and Lorde have influenced an entire generation of feminist theorists of the body whose inquiries drive this chapter's interrogation of women's cancer literature. Sontag's critique of metaphoric objectification and the dehumanizing effects of medical discourses of cancer has informed British sociologist Jackie Stacey's post-modern approach to cancer discourse in Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and British philosopher Margrit Shildrick's bioethical argument in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997) for a "postmodern feminist ethic" (12). Lorde's emphasis on difference and her view of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability status as intersecting axes of identity have influenced theories of embodiment by three U.S. feminists: Rosemarie Garland Thomson's manifesto on feminist disability theory in Extraordinary Bodies (1997) and related essays; Zillah Eisenstein's promulgation of an antiracist, anticapitalist "breast-felt politics" in Manmade Breast Cancers (2001); and Diane Price Herndl's theorizations of feminism and bodily hybridity in "Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals" (2002).

In this chapter I use the insights of these and other feminist theorists to analyze the major themes, tropes, and narrative strategies that govern literary representations of cancer in exemplary texts by women written between 1960 and 2003. I argue that feminist theories of the body illuminate cancer literature by providing tools and methodology for scrutinizing five key ways in which women's ill bodies have been textually represented: as medicalized, leaky, amputated, prosthetic, and (not) dying. These five tropes, in turn, serve as a framework for understanding how stigmatization diminishes ill women's subjectivity and how feminist writing can enhance it. Medicalized bodies generally experience invasive treatment and only possible or partial recovery; the women who inhabit these bodies and/or represent them in literature struggle with issues of appropriation and agency in the face of medical intervention that can be traumatic, whether lifesaving or useless. Leaky bodies exhibit an often disturbing instability, as blood or fluids from the breast or uterus spill or ooze; women who leak may be represented in exemplary literary texts as either abject or transgressive. Amputated bodies signify a radical absence, generally of a cancerous breast or uterus, organs frequently sexualized and culturally constructed as essential to femininity; women who inscribe the experience of lumpectomies, mastectomies, or hysterectomies strive to confront loss and to redefine themselves or their protagonists as strong and erotically powerful. Prosthetic bodies evolve from the surgical reconstruction of amputated body parts; women who write about choosing reconstructive surgery struggle to comprehend a new-found hybridity, while those who reject reconstruction strive to embrace their breastless chests. Surviving, or "not dying," bodies live in a liminal state, vulnerable to the recurrence of cancer and frequent medical scrutiny, while dying bodies typically suffer, shrink or bloat, and eventually fail. Women who record the experience of living with or beyond cancer often express enormous relief yet wrestle with survivor guilt, while women who write about dying may grieve, despair, or review their lives in affirmative ways.

The questions that drive this chapter are discursive, textual, and cultural. What does each of these defining tropes of women's cancer literature mean and do? How has medical discourse, with its language of war, battles, epidemics, victims, and survivors, affected women writers' representations of cancer? What alternative discourses have these writers developed? Since women's experiences of life-threatening illness vary significantly across race, class, nationality, and sexual orientation, how do women's literary representations of cancer reflect these differences even as they trace the common dimensions of this disease?

MEDICALIZED BODIES

Although it was written nearly thirty years ago, Sontag's Illness as Metaphor remains an incisive text for interrogating the dehumanization that cancer patients have often experienced at the hands of medical practitioners. In this study she claims insightfully that when "primitive" cells are seen as multiplying wildly, physicians may deny their patients agency, for they perceive that "you are being replaced by the non-you" and that the "natural order" is thus being violated (67). Sontag also critiques the rhetoric of war that characterizes medical discourse about cancer:

The bromides of the American cancer establishment, tirelessly hailing the imminent victory over cancer; the professional pessimism of a large number of cancer specialists, talking like battle-weary officers mired down in an interminable colonial war-these are twin distortions in this military rhetoric about cancer. (66-67)

Cancer patients rarely benefit from such inflated rhetorical gestures, she argues: their treatments may be invasive, indeed poisonous; their medicalized bodies may strike them as frail and unfamiliar; the stigmatization they face and the pain they experience may be debilitating; the promise of victory may ring false. Sontag applauds the struggle for dignity and self-determination that many people with cancer nonetheless undertake, and she remains optimistic that both the discourse and the treatments of cancer will evolve.

In Teratologies Jackie Stacey both draws upon and critiques Sontag's perspective on agency and medicalization. Stacey's postmodern treatise goes beyond Sontag in challenging the gender hierarchies of the medical establishment's discourse, in which "heroic men of medicine," associated with reason and progress, "save women from the horrors of their bodies" (11). Basing her argument on her own experience of treatment for ovarian cancer, Stacey acknowledges the seductive appeal that such "masculine heroic narratives" offered as she moved through the British health care system from diagnosis to surgery to chemotherapy. "Trust the doctors, they know best," she heard repeatedly. "Your body becomes the battleground between good science and bad disease. If you give yourself up to their wisdom and follow instructions, you stand the best chance" (11). But Stacey refuses to "give herself up" to her physicians. Instead, like Sontag, she questions the cultural rhetoric that represents all cancerous bodies as "out of control, governed only by the rules of outlaws," and she further challenges the sexist rhetoric that often objectifies women patients (11). Although she praises Sontag for her astute critique of "metaphoric thinking in matters medical," Stacey ultimately rejects the belief that biomedicine itself will destigmatize cancer. "Sontag's faith in medical science brings her narrative to resolution," Stacey claims; "for her, science is the hero who will rescue cancer patients from their stigmatized status" (47). For Stacey, in contrast, this "retreat into the radical materialism of biomedicine" seems counterproductive, given that the medical establishment has been the primary initiator of such stigmatizing rhetoric. To be sure, Stacey critiques alternative medical models as well-those herbal, dietary, and meditation treatments for cancer that Sontag also interrogates. While advocates of these regimens can be commended for treating patients as subjects rather than objects, Stacey notes, they too often represent patients as heroes who can heal themselves and thereby grow wiser. Thus alternative regimens may participate as actively in "the fantasy of masculine invincibility" as traditional biomedical models do (12).

Stacey further extends Sontag's analysis in her concern with who and what such heroic narratives exclude-with the ways these narratives often fail to articulate racial and sexual differences. Throughout Teratologies Stacey foregrounds the "political questions raised by cultural narratives" in part because as a cancer patient she felt isolated due to her "difference": her ovarian cancer manifested itself in a rare and "grotesque" form known as teratoma, she is a lesbian who was visited daily in the hospital by her female partner, she sought alternative therapies as well as conventional medical ones, and she refused to wear a wig on a ward in which everyone else concealed the baldness that resulted from their chemotherapy treatments (17). Her medicalized body in effect spoke its differences, and "in this context my story had a certain freakish ring to it; no one else seemed to have been here before" (17).

As Margrit Shildrick explains in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries, however, many women have "been here before"; indeed, she argues that cancer patients have long been "doubly disenabled by their status as female and patients" (116). Shildrick supports her claim through a critique of the active/passive dichotomy that has long existed between doctors and cancer patients of both genders and all races and sexualities. Since the rise of bioethics in the 1970s and 1980s, the medical encounter has increasingly been envisioned as "not simply an intervention on the part of an active participant into the life of a passive one, but a transaction between two self-determining moral agents" (8). Yet this ideal has not been fully realized, since patients are rarely accorded self-determination. With Stacey, Shildrick recognizes that gender bias is a further problem in both the medical encounter and the ethical theories that evaluate it, for "both the material body and the female are positioned as other to the transcendent subject and denied expression in ethical paradigms" (9). Drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of disease as socially constructed through the medical gaze, Shildrick argues that as a "disciplinary regime," biomedicine has long sought to stabilize the corporeal by endorsing a mind-body split (the split that characterizes all Western religious and philosophical discourse) and thus disembodying the "knowing subject" (Foucault, Birth; Shildrick, "Leaky" 11-13). As a postmodern feminist she advocates that feminism seek to "reclaim the materiality of women's bodies" even as she acknowledges that when patients are treated for life-threatening illnesses, both men and women can be "en-gendered as female" (115-16). Only by according agency to all medicalized bodies, while recognizing the particular objectification of female, racial/ethnic, and gay and lesbian bodies, can the medical establishment practice a just ethic of care.

Sontag's theory and the feminist analyses of Stacey and Shildrick help to illuminate literary texts by contemporary U.S., British, and Canadian/Trinidadian women that examine the intersection of gender and medicalization. For example, U.S. poet Alicia Ostriker's "The Bridge" explores the trauma that occurs during a routine mammogram when the speaker is called back for a second procedure once a potentially cancerous cyst is detected. When "the mammogram technician / Says Sorry, we need to do this again," the poet muses,

... you have already become a statistic, Citizen of a country where the air, Water, your estrogen, have just saluted Their target cells, planted their Judas kiss Inside the Jerusalem of the breast. Here on the film what looks like specks of dust Is calcium deposits. (The Crack 85)

Like Sontag, Ostriker employs the controlling metaphor of illness as a strange country whose "onerous citizenship" humans deplore. However, the poet further defines her troubled "country" in environmental terms-even its air and water are dangerous-and in terms of bodily betrayal: the realization that her own cells and hormones have put her body at grave risk is daunting. "Try saying fear," Ostriker continues. "Now feel / Your tongue as it cleaves to the roof of your mouth" (85). The poet describes vividly how the "the night-side of life"-another of Sontag's metaphors for illness-can overwhelm the day. Entry into the "kingdom of the ill" is disorienting if not terrifying for Ostriker, as for many other women, yet she determines to chart the terrain of her medicalized body on her own terms (Sontag, Illness 1).

(Continues...)



Excerpted from FRACTURED BORDERS by Mary K. DeShazer Copyright © 2005 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

\rrhp\ \lrrh: Contents\ \1h\ Contents \xt\ \comp: add page numbers on page proofs\ Introduction: Women, Cancer, Writing Chapter One: "The Night-Side of Life": Analyzing Cancer Literature from Feminist Perspectives Chapter Two: "Skinnied on the Left Side Like a Girl": Embodying Cancer on the Feminist Stage Chapter Three: Entering "the House / of Lightning": Resistance and Transformation in U.S. Women's Breast Cancer Poetry Chapter Four: Dying into the Lite: Popular Fiction, Cancer, and the Romance of Women's Relationships Chapter Five: "Floating Out on a Yacht Called Eros": Memory, Desire, and Death in Women's Experimental Cancer Fiction Chapter Six: "Entering Cancerland": Self-Representation, Commonality, and Culpability in Women's Autobiographical Narratives Conclusion: The Cultural Work of Women's Cancer Literature Notes Works Cited Index \to come\ \eof\
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