“Committed from Head to Toe?”: Cancer, Immigration, and Kinship in Verena Stefan’s Fremdschläfer

Reading Verena Stefan’s Fremdschläfer (Alien Sleepers) against the backdrop of her landmark text Shedding (Häutungen) reveals a significant shift in the author’s treatment of the female body. While her earlier work euphemistically stages the notion of peeling skin as a moment of self-realization, shedding skin and hair now points to the effects two substantial forms of feeling foreign or estranged have on the body: immigration and cancer. This article analyzes the ways in which immigration, breast cancer, and kinship are linked. It highlights specifically the parallel structure of the lesbian protagonist’s immigration in Canada, her “immigration”— in her words—into the “country of cancer patients” and the “immigration” of the tumor into her body. At the same time, it argues that despite the observed differences between Shedding and Fremdschläfer, Stefan still emphasizes kinship models based on female solidarity and abides by her political and aesthetic program of radical subjectivity.