In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Theorizing Breast Cancer: Narrative, Politics, Memory
  • Mary K. DeShazer (bio) and Anita Helle (bio)

The essays gathered for this special double issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature theorize written and visual breast cancer narratives from various aesthetic, ethical, theoretical, memorial, and political vantage points. When we invited proposals for this volume, we were prepared to take up transnational, queer, environmental, biomedical, and sociocultural perspectives on feminist theories of cancer embodiment and literary self-representation. We could not have anticipated that we would receive an abundance of submissions with a postmillennial emphasis and that many would stretch the traditional boundaries of “women’s literature” to focus on an array of multimodal breast cancer narratives. Included among the sub-genres are romance novels, graphic memoirs, cyberfeminist blogs, autoperformances, photo-textual productions, cinematic narratives, and paintings that combine word and image.

Women’s cancer narratives and their scholarly treatments, as part of a broader academic terrain of illness narratives and studies of literature and medicine, have challenged dominant cultural discourses of women’s lived experience for several generations since the rise of the women’s health movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Among the earliest breast cancer narratives to receive critical attention were Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1977), which calls for a de-stigmatization of cancer patients and an end to military metaphors of fighting the disease; Rose Kushner’s Breast Cancer: A Personal History and an Investigative Report (1975), which questions the ubiquity of the Halsted mastectomy and calls for study of environmental causes; and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980), which offers a Black lesbian feminist account of challenging medical hegemony and eschewing reconstructive surgery.1 Visual art also became a public medium for representing breast cancer in the 1970s and 1980s. A defiant poster featuring a photograph by Hella Hammid that depicts the tattooed mastectomy scar of United States poet Deena Metzger circulated widely, as did radical photographs of breasts Marked Up for Amputation by British photographer and memoirist Jo Spence.2 This trend continued in a postmastectomy self-portrait entitled Beauty Out of Damage by Matuschka that provoked controversy when it appeared on the cover of the 15 August 1993 New York Times Magazine and culminated in the 1999 publication of Hollis Sigler’s [End Page 7] Breast Cancer Journal, a collection of the acclaimed artist’s paintings depicting her experience of this disease.3

Academic studies of illness narratives emerged late in the twentieth century, including such critical studies of autopathography as Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995), which examines the liberating and delimiting dimensions of restitution narratives; G. Thomas Couser’s Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997), which theorizes representations of vulnerable embodiment in autobiographies about illness; and Jackie Stacey’s Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997), which critiques “masculine” cancer narratives that deify surgical oncologists as “heroic men of medicine” and that pressure women patients to “generate fantasies of heroic recoveries and miracle cures.”4 During the early twenty-first century, scholarly studies of illness narratives, and especially breast cancer narratives, have proliferated. In The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies (2007), Einat Avrahami argues that contemporary illness narratives “underline the uneasy coexistence of the lived body with the multiply inscribed cultural body” and compel an implicit reader-viewer-artist contract based on a “reality effect” that she defines as narrated through the traumatized self-in-crisis.5 In Fractured Borders: Reading Women’s Cancer Literature (2005), Mary K. DeShazer examines five ways in which women’s ill bodies have been represented—as medicalized, leaky, amputated, prosthetic, and (not) dying—and claims that literary depictions of cancer can provide readers with strategies for resistance, healing, and commemoration.6 Lisa Diedrich’s Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness (2007) traces productively the historical and narrative rise of the “politicized patient”; Ann Jurecic’s Illness as Narrative (2012) considers how pain moves from body to language in narratives of suffering; and DeShazer’s Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives (2013) explores how postmillennial visual and written cancer narratives depart from the strategies and themes of their predecessors.7

Breast cancer narratives...

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