Although I regularly assign Audre Lorde’s “Breast Cancer: Power vs Prosthesis” in my disability course, I don’t know that I’d ever sat down and read her Cancer Journals straight through. Having now done so I’m not sure that’s how it was intended. The book consists of three essays, and some of the examples that stuck with me I now realize may have done so because they repeat across chapters: the lambswool prosthetic Lorde is offered and tries (unsuccessfully at first) to refuse, the story about masturbation as a rediscovery of her body after surgery, the nurse who tells her she is ‘bad for morale,” the potlucks and community among her friends, etc.
In the disability class, I focus on prosthetics as technologies that introduce all sorts of ambivalence for both their users and those around them–observers and professionals alike. The lambswool fake breast is inherently tied to the stigma around breast cancer. As Lorde explains, people who have had mastectomies all wearing prosthetic breasts makes it impossible for breast cancer survivors to see and find one another. It hides the illness away. She uses the language of silence and voice, which I’m less fond of (not that visibility doesn’t also have its issues), but the point is solid. Prostheses balance cosmetics and function in different ways. My nasal cannula is on the opposite side of a continuum from a fake breast (function over form) but both mark their wearers, visibly or invisibly.
Lorde also draws a connection between the fake breasts made for cancer patients and cosmetic surgery on breasts more broadly, calling out the industry as not primarily being for or about women. This is a common theme throughout the book: things that are about personal experience, about “just” cancer become political, ranging from cosmetic surgery to environmental poisons. At the same time, she also says that each woman (a term to which I will return in a moment) has to make her own choice and all choices are valid, so long as they are made consciously.
In other ways, what struck me is how long ago the late 70s and early 80s really are now. One of the striking points in the book that I did not remember is that for her, physical pain had to precede emotional pain. And when I think about the physical pain I shudder. Pain management was not a thing like it is today when she was hospitalized, and add to that her status as a Black lesbian woman, and I wonder whether she got adequate pain treatment even for the time (the active participation of her partner may have helped–it’s hard to know). All of the hospital scenes strike me like this, which is not to say everything is all good now, just that things were even worse then.
Lorde’s language is also a weird mix of timeless and of her moment. Her address is sometimes to women as a category–one that has been so fully challenged in contemporary feminism (TERFs excluded)–sometimes to Black women (a category that still seems to resonate in its specificity), and sometimes to Black lesbians. I feel like that world was slowly moving out of focus as I came to my own political consciousness in the late 80s and 90s–despite the persistence of the potluck as a social form–and now is a kind of memory. Lesbian culture means something very different when there is a spectrum of genders more fully available to more people. And the kinds of gestures I find across that book, from how she discusses her sexuality to how she discusses her community, are very much of that earlier moment, before same sex marriage, before the flowering of trans and non binary politics, and at a time where lesbian culture was shaped even more by heterosexism in all its violent and nonviolent forms than it is now. At the same time she understood her sexuality, her relationships, and her culture to be radical acts simply because they existed and sustained her. Her world no longer exists. That’s both and good and a bad thing.
The book also has repeated reflections on fear and mortality that I hadn’t clocked as seriously in past readings. “In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions become strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences” (18). This point is echoed later in a comment on activism, after discussing widespread systemic violence in the U.S.: “the only truly happy people I have ever met are those of us who work against these deaths with all the energy of our being, recognizing the deep and fundamental unhappiness with which we are surrounded, at the same time as we fight to keep from being submerged by it” (77.) I connect these two thoughts because they inform one another. It’s something of a cliche that near-death experiences can lead to people putting their lives more in focus. (This cliche is worth unpacking on its own but that will have to be for another post.) But for Lorde, that death has to be understood in a broader context: individual death has to be set against collective death. In this way, she was at the forefront of politicized cancer writing to come: yes, my disease is individual, but it is also social and environmental. The question “why me” can only be asked if we ask why the disease exists as it does, why the medical system works the way it does, and why the systems of values around both exist as they do.