The Subjects of Survival: The Anti-Intersectional Routes of Breast Cancer

“You look better with hair.” This was my grandmother’s response when she saw me shortly after I had completed chemotherapy. And because she was dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, this observation was repeated each time she saw me. My mother was worried that if I showed up on my grandmother’s front door with a bald head, it would necessarily burden my grandmother with the requisite anxiety and fear that I might be dying of cancer. But my grandmother was far too superficial for that (I take after my grandmother), and her matter-of-fact tone that I might consider growing hair as an aesthetic preference entertained me every time. And yet, within my genderqueer communities, many seem to disagree with my grandmother. I was “cruised on” by queers during my chemotherapy more than any time before, and sadly, ever since. With the addition of a leather accessory, I could pretty much guarantee a wink or a look by a passing queer. And given my white, middle-class, Nebraskan background, being seen as a punkish queer was a delight indeed.

The bald head was only the first of many opportunities for gender-queerness and coalitional subjectivity brought on by the deadly prognosis. Alongside horrific chronic pain from treatment, a likely death from cancer at some point in the not so distant future, and a highly tenuous journey on the tenure track, breast cancer allowed for a wide array of opportunities to embody some of the many intersectionalities of lived experience.

I’m in good company. Some of the most inspiring feminist scholars have lived with and negotiated the constraints and conventions of breast cancer. Audre Lorde set the tone when she railed against the “imposed silence” of breast cancer, particularly as manifest in the demand that breast cancer patients wear prostheses and wigs in order to cover over the violence of breast cancer in U.S. society (1997, 7). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offered us the playful suggestion that breast cancer might be one of the most profound opportunities for an “adventure in applied deconstruction” (1993, 12). And more recently, S. Lochlann Jain described how challenging it is for a butch lesbian to endure the “relentless hyper- and heterosexualization of the disease” (2007, 506).

What brings these scholars together is not merely their feminist and queer critiques of the ways in which breast cancer is represented and contorted through the breast cancer industrial complex. They also share a longing and heartfelt search for agentic subject positions in which they can model and forge their own terms of survival. As Lorde observed, “Off and on I keep thinking. I have cancer. I’m a black lesbian feminist poet, how am I going to do this now? Where are the models for what I’m supposed to be in this situation? But there were none. That is it, Audre. You’re on your own” (1997, 28). And Jain, in a similar though less intersectional vein, pointed out that across the hyper-heterosexualization of the disease, “There is simply no subject position available for the cancer butch” (2007, 521). And as Sedgwick expresses, in an exasperated tone, “I can’t tell you how many people—women, men, gay, straight, feminists, gender traditionalists—have said or implied to me that my proper recourse for counsel, encouragement, solidarity in dealing with breast cancer would be (i.e., I infer, had better be) other women in their most essential identity as women” (1992, 202–3). Each of these scholars, in their own way, wrestles with the limited and contorted terms of survival subjectivity as produced by hegemonic breast cancer discourses. Throughout mainstream breast cancer, survival has been routed into a white, normative, heterogendered, ableist subjectivity.

But in my experience, the anti-intersectional subject position offered by hegemonic breast cancer takes work. The breast cancer industry, in all of its postfeminist glory, works endlessly and strategically to guide breast cancer patients around and away from the obvious intersectionalities and multiple subjectivities of embodied vulnerability. Women of color scholarship has consistently critiqued the violence of racialized, gendered, and sexualized normativities...