Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives by Mary K. DeShazer (review)

Given Western culture’s fixation on illness and medicine’s Faustian bargain to cure whatever ails us, it is perhaps not surprising that scholars have coined so many neologisms for narratives about the body and its complaints. In addition to “illness memoir,” we have “pathography” and “autopathography,” “thanatography” and “autothanatography,” “dolorology,” and now Mary DeShazer’s breast cancer narrative term “mammography.” DeShazer’s study of the discourses implicated in personal narratives about this modern plague surveys a burgeoning millennial, multinational, and multimedia field of texts with emphasis on both verbal and visual modalities. Defining “mammography” as “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 mapping of the breast cancer experience” (2), DeShazer illuminates the colliding geographies of oncology and self-representation that constitute patientcentered perspectives on breast cancer.

Fractured Borders, DeShazer’s 2005 book, examined fictional, dramatic, and poetic writing about cancer as a gendered phenomenon and concluded with a chapter about women’s pathographies. Mammographies picks up where Fractured Borders left off, zeroing in on the array of nonfiction narrative forms associated with breast cancer biography. The new study showcases the growth of the genre in its examination of photographic anthologies as well as in its consideration of collaboratively produced testimonials. Documenting the increasing specialization of cultural cancer studies, DeShazer sifts out the queer, transnational, political, and ecological discourses embedded in her primary materials and joins others in lamenting that conventional medicine continues to focus on detection rather than the causes and prevention of breast cancer.

DeShazer initially trains a gendered lens on post-millennial photography— some of it produced in “selfie” mode. Articulating points of epistemological convergence between visual and verbal accounts of breast cancer, she asks, “What distinctive contributions to readers’ and viewers’ understanding of women’s material and technologized bodies do breast cancer photo narratives offer?” and “How might feminist theories of illness, autobiography, and embodiment, and postmodern constructions of narrative subjectivity, enhance analysis and interpretation of breast cancer’s textual and visual representations?” (17–18). Her answer comes in the form of no-holds-barred accounts by Catherine Lord (The Summer of Her Baldness [2004]) and the late Lynn Kohlman (Lynn, Front to Back [2005]), who document the aesthetic and psychological challenges of baldness and mastectomy. Both writers strive to retain their idiosyncratic styles: Lord plays humorously with her butch lesbian status and finds her sexuality more delightfully indeterminate than ever, while Kohlman, a Matuschka ally, who worked in the fashion industry from the 1960s to the 2000s, models her breastless torso and stapled skull incision. These literally cutting-edge images, DeShazer notes, convey “somatic and cultural resistance” (24): both cancer subjects see enhancement where the less imaginative see loss.

Resistance to the culturally infused therapies of complacency that the medical-industrial complex authorizes in its pink-ribbon product drives is formulaic in Mammographies. From Audre Lorde’s primal prosthesis moment in The Cancer Journals (1980) to the politically astute, revelatory accounts by Zillah Eisenstein, Evelyne Accad, and S. Lochlann Jain, DeShazer finds disturbing patterns. Despite a more radicalized groundswell of voices that question corporate responsibility for the increasing incidence of millennial cancers, these writers observe more subtle forms of public silencing that may still amount to death for the en-tumored and shroud polluters’ environmental culpability. DeShazer’s critical scrutiny identifies “Cancer Butch” author Jain in particular as outing “the politics of appearance in breast cancer culture” (41). Curious to see what would happen when she attended an exercise class shirtless after a double mastectomy, Jain has gone to the mat in calling out the heterosexism, racism, and chauvinism that lace public assumptions about breast cancer sufferers. DeShazer affirms that these “discourses of disavowal” (65) have also characterized health and pharmaceutical professionals’ advocacy of prosthesis as the default for those undergoing treatment. More anxious to dismiss angst than to confront it in their...