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  • Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives by Mary K. DeShazer
  • Shelly A. Gregory (bio)
Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives, by Mary K. DeShazer . Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press , 2013 . 239 pp. $55.00 .

In this provocative, innovative, and surprisingly thorough study, Mary K. DeShazer successfully traces the evolution of breast cancer culture. She coins “mammographies” to describe illness narratives written exclusively about breast cancer after the twentieth century, adding that “mammographies signifies both the technology of imaging by which most Western women learn that they have contracted breast cancer and the documentary imperative that drives their written and visual mappings of the breast cancer experience” (p. 2). She stresses that while there have been many positive changes in breast cancer studies and in breast cancer treatment, the disease’s mortality rate internationally is on the rise with only a nominal number of women courageous enough to engage in a counter-discourse within their communities. Mammographies have greatly influenced these counter-discourses.

Organizing much of her study around developments in breast cancer discourses from pre- to postmillennial narratives, DeShazer shows that twentieth-century breast cancer narratives tend to be written works that are subjective and focused on the self. Key to the early formulation of these narratives were Audre Lorde, author of The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (1988), and Susan Sontag, author of Illness as Metaphor (1978). Lorde contended that cancer is a political, racist, and environmental concern that needs to be addressed internationally. Very few listened, but Zillah Eisenstein heard and answered Lorde’s plea in 1999 at the Second World Conference on Breast Cancer. Eisenstein challenged medical establishments, governments, and environmentalists to help prevent breast cancer mortality among African Americans and the poor across the globe. In comparison to twentieth-century narratives, postmillennial ones like Eisenstein’s may be written but also may be visual, verbal, and performative. Such hybrid works emphasize collaboration, technologies, and international communication. DeShazer’s book, too, is another example of a hybrid work. Her book is prosaic, pictorial, and has multiple biographical excerpts from women in China and Israel. She also includes texts found on Facebook and Twitter—two sources not available for twentieth-century breast cancer narratives. [End Page 241]

DeShazer’s approach to mammographies explores the rapidly increasing use of photographic technology, taking as its subject people of every race and nationality. These photographic images, which can be posted on the Internet every minute of every day, represent heterosexual, pregnant, lesbian, young, old, male, female, and transgendered individuals, among others. According to DeShazer, when the artist Matuschka published photos of her postmastectomy chest in The New York Times in 1993, she quickly propelled breast cancer narratives into mammographies and thus to postmillenial visual and global discussions about women’s postmastectomy bodies. Catherine Lord, self-described cancer butch, created a photographic biography, The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (2004), that is filled with images of rage, acceptance, resistance, and beauty as she orders the photos in a nonlinear way. DeShazer suggests that Lord’s way of depicting herself destabilizes the categorization of cancer as weakness.

Photographing women as they are dying from breast cancer is not without controversy. When Annie Leibovitz published A Photographer’s Life (2006), a book about lover Susan Sontag, critics were aghast at the way Leibovitz portrayed the final years of Sontag’s struggle with breast cancer. Sontag, who worked so hard to reverse both negative metaphors of cancer and the dehumanization of those with (breast) cancer, is shown in familiar ways, argues Leibovitz, who photographed Sontag’s fragility and physical weakness. But others, including Sontag’s son, think otherwise. He contends that Leibovitz took advantage of her lover’s fame by exposing Sontag in ways that she would not want to be remembered. The many photonarratives discussed in DeShazer’s book are tasteful, startling, stunning, and even humorous as they mourn and celebrate postmastectomy embodiment.

DeShazer examines how genetic and medical advances have replaced the premillennial emphasis on early detection with the postmillennial philosophy of prevention first and detection second. She writes about the recent interest in the controversial BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast and...

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