Breast Cancer: A Disability of Womanhood? A Literary Response to Mastectomy
Chris Leary
English Literature Dept
University of Sheffield (U.K.)
It was very important for me, after my mastectomy, to develop and encourage my own internal sense of power. I needed to rally my energies in such a way as to image myself as a fighter resisting rather than as a passive victim suffering. (Audre Lorde, 'Cancer Journals', p.53)
In this paper I examine how a number of female writers, including Deena Metzger, Louise Clifton and Betty Rollin, respond to the reality of suffering breast cancer and its treatment. I compare and contrast various attitudes towards the impact that the disease has upon a woman’s impression of her own sexuality. Whilst there is a general trend towards grieving the loss of one’s womanhood I also discuss how, in the act of writing about the transformative experience of breast cancer, the poet Audre Lorde is empowered, both politically, in feminist terms, and personally, in being able to reclaim her body from the male gaze. I use Foucault to aid my analysis.
Foucault argues that the outcome of disciplinary power is the docile body, a body ‘that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved’. He is discussing this model of power in the context of prison and armies, but we can adapt the central insights of this notion to see how, particularly through the act of mastectomy, women’s bodies are entering ‘a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it’ and it is this act that Lorde exposes as a political metamorphosis of embodiment in her memoir 'The Cancer Journals'. Although for many women, to be seen as fully breasted is to feel fully female Lorde reacts to her mastectomy as a political project in an attempt to salvage the female from the surveyed state by dismantling ‘the machinery that turns a female body into a feminine one’.
Employing the theories of Judith Butler I illustrate how Lorde exposes and questions the patriarchal dictum that if one is born female one should display ‘feminine’ characteristics. In embracing the transforming deformity of her own body she becomes empowered and, symbolically at least, operates the concept of the gaze outside the community of the heterosexual economy of the traditionally masculine observation of women.