Session 8b: Breast Cancer and Surgery: New Interpretations
Chair: Regis de Silva

The Creative Force of Words: An Analysis of Anger in Three Breast Cancer Narratives
Lizabeth Rand
Hampden-Sydney College, Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, USA

Breast cancer, according to historian James S. Olson, is an “old disease.  It transcends race, class, time, and space, a horror known to every culture in every age.”  People died from other types of cancer, but, as Olson points out, many of these tumors were not visible to the naked eye.  Advanced breast cancer, on the other hand, was all too visible and apparent, “wreaking havoc with the breast and the body.  Establishing a causal connection between breast tumors and death was relatively simple.”  Breast cancer treatment remained inadequate well into the 19th and 20th centuries.  Physicians believed that the disease, treated early and aggressively at the site of origin, offered the best hope.  For this reason, women agreed to have radical surgeries that were painful and disfiguring, yet they often died later from the disease.  Little was known about the metastatic potential of breast cancer.
In this presentation, I want to discuss three breast cancer narratives—Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Welcome to Cancerland,” Betty Rollin’s First, You Cry, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals—and how each of these writers engages and enacts anger in response to the deadly disease of breast cancer.  I discuss the interruptive and disruptive power of illness and how three women use this power—claim it, really—to give them strength and give them voice.  Physician and clinical professor Eric J. Cassell reminds us in his 1991 book The Nature of Suffering that illness happens not only to the body, but also to the person: “. . . someone devoid of physical pain, perhaps even devoid of ‘symptoms,’ can suffer.  People can suffer from what they have lost of themselves in relation to the world of objects, events, and relationships.  Such suffering occurs because our intactness as persons, our coherence and integrity, come not only from intactness of the body but from the wholeness of the web of relationships with self and others.”  Ehrenreich, Rollin, and Lorde undercut polite discourse about cancer in order to lessen the personal and political suffering that they feel towards the disease.  Each is the “anti”-cancer patient, subverting the notion that cancer will make one into a “better person” or that one must be “brave” and “heroic” in order to fight the disease successfully.  Ehrenreich, Rollin, and Lorde intend to do cancer in their own ways—in their own time—as much as they are able to.  They unsettle us, and, I argue, we need to remain unsettled about such a deadly disease.

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More than Birth, Sex, and Death? The Personal and Social Significance of Breasts and Breast Surgery in Contemporary Britain
Jude Frankau
Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom

It is widely accepted that women have breasts and that breasts denote femaleness; in contemporary Britain the conventional significance of breasts is in their three-fold existence for erotic, maternal, and medicalised purposes.  Drawing on the examples of the ‘natural’ breastfeeding breast, the ‘constructed’ sexualised breast, and the ‘unnatural’ diseased/disordered breast, and focusing on the ‘deviant’ ‘absent’ breast, this paper seeks to challenge the assumptions that these roles reflect a fixed relationship between the sexed body, gender, and sexuality.  The three typical ‘identities’ of breasts will be briefly considered, looking at the influences which draw on and reconstitute these interpretations, in order to move away from staid interpretations of the roles of breasts and presuppositions of gender roles.  From this foundation the paper will explore the implications of the ‘absent’ breast, where the breast is not present due to surgery or a medical ‘disorder’, or conversely where breasts are present but their absence would better reflect the personal identity of their bearer, to consider how gender and ‘biological sex’ are constructed and maintained through different discourses, including that of medicine, and of how different bodies reflect set identities and desires.
This leads to a discussion of how undergoing surgery affects identity formation, and how this relates to what society perceives as ‘deviant’ bodies or identities.  In conclusion, whilst different formulations of gender, sexuality, and the physical body are possible, highlighted by the absence or presence of breasts and the uses to which they are deployed or denied, only certain configurations are socially acceptable.  The cultural currency of ‘perfect’ unambiguously ‘acceptable’ bodies and identities for example, denies the place in the public domain of ‘real’ breasts in favour of cosmetically enhanced ‘idealised’ breasts.  This disavowal of bodies of alterity marks a site of resistance, which would be fruitful ground for further research.

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