The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

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Sarah Cooper, Ph.D., Colorado State University 

and Hannah Taylor, Ph.D., Duke University

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Abstract

In this paper we draw on the works of rhetorician Cynthia Ryan and disability scholars Margaret Price, Jasbir Puar and Allison Kafer to consider how Audre Lorde’s prolific writing in The Cancer Journals offers futurity rooted in queerness. While scholars have noted Lorde’s uses of militaristic language to situate her body, we argue this positioning is not just about fighting cancer. Rather, we assert, Lorde’s militaristic language is a vehicle for critiquing larger social structures.

Key terms: Disability; Queer; Illness; Embodiment; Time

 

“I do not forget cancer for very long, ever. That keeps me armed and on my toes, but also with a slight background of noise,” writes Audre Lorde in 1980 (p. 7). The entirety of her text, The Cancer Journals, describes a woman’s isolating, disembodied experiences with breast cancer. In particular, as previous scholars have described (Segal; Wu; Ryan), and as evidenced above Lorde’s experiences with breast cancer reveal a preoccupation with militaristic language when discussing  her illness. Though the connections between militaristic language, the warrior/amazon archetype, and warfare in Lorde’s work have been discussed by scholars in disability rhetorics, we argue that this focus interrupts any hope of futurity for the chronically ill subject as it positions death as a failure and leaves little room for narratives outside of triumph. Using Lorde’s work, this paper builds off of scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine that discusses the regulatory power of illness narratives. Instead of adhering to dominant narratives of death and dying, Lorde imagines a future outside of the heteropatriarchal structures that uphold the state through militaristic language. In doing so, The Cancer Journals offers insight into how narratives of illness can imagine new futures and challenge gender norms.

The Cancer Journals were first published 40 years ago, and detail Lorde’s journey through her mastectomy. Lorde engages in multiple genres within the text, offering both cultural critique, diary entries, and at some points, literary prose. Each chapter begins with a contextualization by Lorde, written after all of the journal entries featured in the book. Importantly, Lorde’s narrative is not presented linearly. Cynthia Ryan (2018) notes in her exploration of cancer survivorship in The Alabama Project that “there is a tendency in our culture, as noted by Arthur Frank (2013), to focus on “restitution” in individual stories about cancer—to conceive of cancer, as any significant health challenge, within the confines of a specified period of time” (p. 376). In other words, we expect narratives of illness, and especially cancer, to be presented within clean timelines. A clean narrative of diagnosis, treatment, and cure is digestible and hopeful. In direct contrast to this expectation, Lorde weaves between reflection, journal entries, and affective explorations of the past and future. She does not begin at diagnosis, and focuses primarily on treatment and the idea of her future. This future, though, is not an inherently hopeful one. In this way, Lorde’s cancer journal entries queer expectations of temporality. She does not offer her readers a clear temporality; Lorde exemplifies what sociologists Alex Broom, Katherine Kenny and Emma Kirby (2018) call the “distinction between ‘objective’ clock time, by which disease progression is clinically assessed, and the ongoing flux of ‘subjective’ time that characterizes patients’ experiences of illness” (p. 684). Lorde’s reflections on her journals provide additional context to the embodied experience. This context allows Lorde to reflect on her identity in important ways, because “as survivors of many kinds of health challenges know, identities and practices sometimes shift long after the episodic moments in which a disease is actively addressed” (Ryan, 2018, p. 377). The form of the journals themselves allow Lorde to address her embodiment as a shifting target, never arriving at an endpoint or moment of triumph beyond cancer.

Dominant narratives of death and dying are rarely in the hands of disabled and terminally ill individuals. Judy Segal (2007) argues that “we praise people for embodying what we value, and we blame them for embodying what we deplore" (p. 61). Disability studies scholars have argued that the morality of health– namely, that healthy individuals are somehow inherently good and that unhealthy individuals brought their illness upon themselves– renders disabled and chronically ill folks as responsible for their negative experiences in healthcare. Segal notes that this is central to the genre of illness narratives, as they not only document and catalog experience but also reflect and reinscribe a hierarchy of values for such experience: “humour is good; despair is bad; surviving is a personal accomplishment; dying, by implication, is the opposite” (p. 5). Therefore, narrative mobility is limited by what is considered “appropriate action” for people who are sick and dying.

It is worth pausing to note that Lorde did not define her journals as a disability text, nor does she position her illness as a disability. There are several likely reasons for this. First, at the time of Lorde’s writing, disability scholarship and activism were more clearly connected to white men with visible disabilities. It is possible that Lorde, in her mission to resist heteronormative whiteness, did not see herself in disability activism, and subsequently resisted incorporation into that community. Secondly, The Cancer Journals does not need to be a disability narrative for disability scholars to glean insight from it. Lorde’s engagement with her body, and the relationship it establishes with the future, offers disability scholars a way to envision a future that challenges oppressive institutions and encourages embodiment of one’s narrative.

To establish how Lorde’s subversion of narrative and gendered expectations in cancer rhetoric established a kind of futurity, we first discuss the nature of futurity and its relation to power, bodies, and time. We then analyze Lorde’s subversive tactics that subvert the militaristic rhetoric typically used in discussion of cancer. We conclude by reading The Cancer Journals as a type of futurity, both crip and queer, one that is attuned to the body for the purpose of critiquing larger social structures that debilitate and disable.

 

Futurity and Narratives of Dying

The future, specifically, has been a topic of discussion among queer and disability scholars. Using José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) concept of queer futurity as a jumping off point, Alison Kafer’s (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip further asks disability studies scholars to question the role temporality plays in social and medical understandings of the disabled body. In the text, Kafer works to bridge definitions of crip time, positing that “[e]xploring disability in time also includes speculation on temporalities of disability: how might disability affect one’s orientation to time?” (p. 26). One such orientation involves the need for more time—time to move, time to think, to process and respond in social situations. Creating space for time is not just about the medical needs of individuals, but also about a society that demands a clear adherence to a linear timeline: “Operating on crip time, then, might be not only about a slower speed of movement but also about ableist barriers over which one has little to no control” (Kafer, 2013, p. 26). However, crip time is about more than just more time for disabled people. As Margaret Price (2011) explains, “[A]dhering to crip time . . . might mean recognizing that people will arrive at various intervals and designing [events] accordingly; and it might also mean recognizing that [people] are processing language at various rates and adjusting the pace of a conversation. It is this notion of flexibility” that is important in crip time, not just more time (p. 18). Kafer’s “call is not only for disability studies to enter into theoretical discussions about time, temporality, and futurity, but also for us to wrestle with the ways in which “the future” has been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness” (2013, p. 32). The erasure of disability from conceptions of the future only further asserts that disability is something to eradicate. In a review of Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, Robert McRuer (2014) discusses the coalition and community building opportunities that can be accomplished through cripping time.            

Futurity is also about control, about who has the ability to live, and in specific ways, across time, and in this way is intimately connected to death. The resistance to focus primarily on death in disability studies may be, in part, because of efforts to resist the general mantra that we’re “better off dead than disabled.” As a result, disability scholarship often focuses on surviving and avoiding death while operating in oppressive systems (Siebers 2008; Braswell 2011). Our aim here is not to reject death, but to reimagine who has control over life and death– both in language and in embodied action and contest the ways the state has defined futurity to resituate agency with the disabled and/or dying. In other words, in many cases when the state addresses disabled subjects, both the material future and abstract futurity are defined through militaristic language. For example, many people who suffer from chronic illness are called warriors (eg. endometriosis warriors) and disable subjects are encouraged to fight (beat cancer or #fightMS) or overcome their illness. To understand the function of this language, we rely on two understandings of embodied state control: necropolitics and chronobiopolitics. This article uses a political framing to ground our understanding of Lorde’s contribution to futurity because there are political implications to death and dying. We explore the question: how does Lorde conceptualize a crip futurity that reckons with and even embraces death?

Necropolitics is concerned with cultural understandings of dying, whose death is celebrated by the state, and what narratives are allowed about death. Achille Mbembe (2003) works to establish a new definition of sovereignty that exists outside of the nation-state, arguing that a normative description of sovereignty is preoccupied with the instrumentalization of human life and destruction of mass populations through national control. Necropolitics is, then, the power to decide who will die, who will feel terror, and how this will affect individual bodies. A central question that Mbembé asks states: “What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency?” (p. 16). As Lorde becomes aware of her death as imminent, but in a way that is not in a state of emergency, her bodily experiences begin to operate outside of the normative bounds of biopolitical control. Though the militaristic language about cancer we discuss in a later section of this paper acts as a mechanism of reasserting that control, Lorde’s reclaiming of this language to imagine new futures allows for a different kind of bodily autonomy, one that resists necropolitics against the besieged body– both literally and figuratively. 

Beyond the politics of dying, chronobiopolitics shapes how people understand the temporal experiences of their lives. Building off of Foucault’s notion of biopower, theories of chronobiopolitics explain how the teleology of the living structures the logic of people’s social inheritance.  According to Elizabeth Freeman (2010), “chronobiopolitics harnesses not only sequence but also cycle, the dialectical companion to sequence, for the idea of time as cyclical stabilizes its forward movement, promising renewal rather than rupture” (p. 5). In this way, temporal structures work not to just regulate but to norm embodied experiences. The impact of this norming is the naturalization of some life experiences and the erasure of those that don’t fit “correct” or “appropriate” timelines. Freeman’s work notes that other identities and experiences, such as illness or pain, can shift one’s orientation to time (p. 7). For all individuals, time can function as a governing structure through establishing norms that operate on a societal scale. In order to be effective, these norms have to be repeated in institutions like education and technologies to the point that they become relatively invisible in society. Sarah Sharma (2014) describes this as “power chronography.” Power chronography has to do with how different temporalities are produced and how certain relationships to time are prioritized over others. Key to this is complicating our rhetorical understandings of temporality. Sharma states:

The term temporal, here, does not imply a transcendent sense of time or the time of history. I mean for the temporal to denote lived time. The temporal is not a general sense of time particular to an epoch of history, but a specific experience of time that is structured in specific political and economic contexts. The temporal operates as a form of social power and a type of social difference. (2014, p. 9)

In the context of these applications “power chronography provides a politicization of time that dispels individualistic accounts of time and allows the social and relational contours of power in its temporal forms to emerge” (Sharma, 2015, p. 14). In other words, time becomes a mechanism to govern bodies and actions toward a common social goal. However, if a person is not working toward that social goal, or is unable to because of their illness, or ability, time becomes an oppressive structure.

The right to live emerges in a very specific way through specific understandings–living visibly in a way that speaks to the narratives allowed in medical discourses. For terminally ill and disabled individuals like cancer patients, temporality is of the highest concern. Temporality is also structured through narrative, and cancer narratives are limited by the temporality of illness. The lack of narrative control that terminally ill people possess is illustrative of the ways by which they exist outside of paradigms of acceptability. Unfortunately, these narratives are primarily shaped by and through medical institutions. Karen Kopelson (2019) discusses how the dominant narrative of dying is shaped by medical doctors, specifically around the concept of control. She “argues that it is precisely in their focus on control, and on how to (and who can) exercise it in the face of illness and death, however, that the texts raise concerns'' for the people who do not fit into archetypal images of chronically ill people (p. 265). Kopelson states that her “remaining concern is not so much with the cultivation of subjects who choose to die but with the insinuation that those of a certain character, manifested in right action, can choose the conditions, trajectories, even the moment, of their dying” (p. 265) In other words, choices about dying are limited to those who have lived in a socially acceptable way. Death, in other words, is an omnipresent rhetorical structure that shapes not only the politics of disability, but who has a right to die in certain ways. For Lorde, a Black, disabled, and queer woman, her death does not fit neatly into acceptable narratives. However, through contesting these culturally accepted narratives, Lorde crafts a new approach to futurity– and gender– through language and embodiment.

 

Shifting Selfhood: Lorde’s Descriptions of Cancer

Lorde resists cancer as a diagnosis and instead offers how cancer is an experience of living with rather than fighting against it. For Lorde, cancer is an experience of sharing her body with cancer. The Cancer Journals describes Lorde’s cohabitation with cancer to illuminate the ways she experiences gender and disability. In the journals themselves, Lorde discusses fear, anger, loss, pain, and sadness. She does not discuss her cancer as an isolated, individual experience, but as part of a larger cultural conversation about  how the medical institution reinforces social norms of gender and sexuality. This is decidedly a departure from the ways that cancer has been discussed historically in public discourse. Ryan (2018) argues that “the ubiquitous conventional breast cancer narratives presented in much public discourse, which feature the upbeat attitude of a survivor who refuses to let her spirits dampen in the face of an unexpected health crisis” is a result of cultural ignorance (p. 374). Lorde’s description of her cancer is far from upbeat. Instead, she focuses on the visceral embodied experiences, almost giving the pain agency in her body. Early in the journal entries, Lorde discusses the immense pain that accompanied her treatment. She states in a solo journal entry: “I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch” (p. 12).  Each of these moments of affective reflection are not about describing the feeling of having cancer, but of describing how the self has changed through diagnosis. Early in the journals, Lorde discusses how her feelings of otherness have impacted her sense of self:

I feel so unequal to what I always handled before, the abominations outside that echo the pain within. And yes I am completely self-referenced right now because it is the only translation I can trust, and I do believe not until every woman traces her weave back strand by bloody self referenced strand, will we begin to alter the whole pattern (p. 11).

Later in the journal entries, she asserts directly that her shifting selfhood is caused by the new sense of embodiment. Discussing her body post-mastectomy, she states, “I would lie if I did not also speak of loss. Any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated into a new sense of self” (p. 16). In each of these moments, Lorde is acknowledging the loss that comes with cancer and mastectomy, and does not give the reader a hopeful turn at the end. ​​Instead of fighting her own body, Lorde is learning to live with her cancer. She integrates the affective experience of treatment into her sense of self, rather than desiring a return to “normal.”

This is not to say that Lorde’s work stands alone and that the remainder of cancer narratives are univocal. However, as Segal (2007) notes, “the problem of the standard story in breast cancer was not so simply explicable in terms of genre itself: the problem was more institutional, less structural and more infrastructural” (p. 5). In other words, the triumph narrative that follows a clear and neat linearity comes not from individual stories, but from structures. Lorde directly addressed the institutional narratives that were put on her by doctors and nurses. She describes her first night post-mastectomy, reflecting on a moment she asked for pain medication: “I remember a disgusted nurse giving me a shot. I remember a voice telling me to be quiet because there were sick people here, and my saying, well, I have a right, because I'm sick too” (p. 36).  The nurse, in this case, is both denying her embodied experience and working to regulate Lorde’s reaction to match the norm. In another moment, a nurse directly asks Lorde why she is not wearing a prosthetic form (p. 49). The doctors also enforce the institutionalized illness narrative. Specifically, she discusses her doctor's insistence on getting a prosthetic breast– a reinforcement of gender norms that we discuss more below. In these moments, Lorde is working to directly counter institutionalized narratives of cancer, and shift discussion beyond triumph. She primarily accomplishes this through language.

Unlike other cancer narratives, Lorde’s clearly understands the power of language to shape and define experiences of cancer. In the first chapter, Lorde discusses the silencing power of fear. In a moment of reflection at the beginning of a chapter, Lorde notes that “In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation, and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation” (p. 22). In this, Lorde draws attention not just to the embodied experience of breast cancer, but also the ways in which we talk about it. Importantly, Lorde is not without a future, as so often happens in discussions about disabled and queer people. She is not relegating herself to death, nor denying the possibility of death. Her future is, instead, directly impacted by the pain and labor associated with her illness. It is born from her illness, shaped by it. A crip futurity is crafted in this way-- not in the absence of embodied experiences of disability, but through the acknowledgment of its impact on one’s life.

 

Fighting the Body: The Militaristic Language of Cancer

Despite the sense of acknowledgement, Lorde nevertheless must address the terminal nature of her illness to fully embody it. While Lorde employs militaristic language, it is used in favor of the subject, rather than the state. Cynthia Wu (2002) contrasts Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and Lorde’s The Cancer Journals to examine the militaristic language used in discussions of cancer. Wu argues that Lorde repurposes the metaphors of illness as warfare and battle to serve the recovering patient. Specifically, her use of the Amazon warrior woman throughout the text makes the patient the warrior and social expectations of cancer survivors the object of critique, instead of the medical institution as warrior and body object of critique. This piece address the relationship between state control, futurity, and death, as it directly points to the political nature of Lorde’s language throughout The Cancer Journals. Additionally, as Jasbir Puar has noted, debility is a tool used to disable certain bodies. Using the work of Puar and Stacey Alaimo’s (2007) concept of the “toxic body,”—the idea that bodies and environments are open to each other and thus what we do to the environment is something we are also doing to ourselves--  we consider how toxic bodies are debilitated by systems and ask, are toxic bodies debilitated in ways non-toxic bodies do not?  We argue Lorde is not fighting against her own body, but the larger institutional, medical, and temporal structures that disembody women with breast cancer.

Puar (2017) addresses the power of the nation-state on citizen’s bodies. Puar uses the body to read not only the power of a nation, but limitations of agency one has over their own body and one’s death. In arguing that the “humanitarian” act of being spared from death creates a logic of “will not let die,” Puar signals how citizens have become immobilized while simultaneously marked through visible wounds, or what she calls maiming. As we discuss, the language Lorde uses to describe her body, specifically the site of her amputated breast, aligns with Puar’s assessment of maiming. Lorde’s militaristic language makes clear she feels a war is being waged on her body by political forces outside of her control– literally and metaphorically. Lorde disrupts cancer as a  straightforward medical diagnosis and asserts cancer is primarily a sense of constrained? embodiment.

As other scholars have mentioned, Lorde positions the body not as an entity to fight against, but as a site of conflict. The war, then, is not a fight against her own body, but against the toxic bodies that Alaimo discusses. This point is emphasized when Lorde claims that breast cancer survivors are warriors, stating:

Well women with breast cancer are warriors, also. I have been to war, and still am… For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s burger and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. (p. 53)

Lorde recognizes these fights as ongoing, not some finite battle to be won or something she is exempt from because she “defeated” the cancer. Instead, Lorde asserts that the fight includes all women against a system and state that continually place female bodies in danger of illness. They become at war because they are the war. To put it another way, what the state is fighting is not cancer, rather cancered bodies, or toxic bodies. Thus, Lorde and those with breast cancer are impacted since what living cancered bodies do is not in alignment with dominant narratives of the future. When the body is something to “defeat,” it is difficult to imagine any kind of embodied future that doesn’t come at the cost of the body. In shifting the locus of militaristic language from the individual body to the larger institutions that debilitate, Lorde is able to focus on a future that does not discount the body. Instead, it is rooted in embodied experience. She asserts that this is a goal of the text  from the beginning:

I have learned much in the 18 months since my mastectomy. My visions of a future I can create have been honed by the lessons of my limitations. Now I wish to give form with honesty and precision to the pain, faith, labor, and loving which this period of my life has translated into strength for me. (p. 8)

Within this passage, Lorde doesn't position her lessons of limitations as negative, rather, simply a reality of her embodied experience that has been changed because of her mastectomy. A key word that Lorde deploys is honesty. Her honesty requires a radical attention to “pain, faith, labor and loving.” For Lorde, to be honest is to be fully present in her embodied experience. She translates these limitations as strength because her future has been crafted through her embodied experiences with mastectomy. Instead of rejecting this experience, Lorde turns toward it, not expressing a wish to return to “normal,” but recognizing that her future doesn’t exist without an awareness of her disability as a form of embodied knowledge. 

As she moves through the text, Lorde cites specific examples of spaces where she embraces her future as an ill future?, and turns away from the social imperative to return to normalcy. In her focus on cosmetic and prosthetic appearance, Lorde critiques the push to apply prosthetics to the body:

It encourages women to dwell in the past rather than a future. This prevents a woman from assessing herself in the present, and from coming to terms with the changed planes of her own body. Since these then remain alien to her, buried under prosthetic devices, she must mourn the loss of her breast in secret, as if it were the result of some crime of which she were guilty. (p. 50)

Lorde’s critiquedemonstrates how a focus on one’s normative/socially palatable physical appearance ignores the present. The phrase “coming to terms with the changed planes of her own body” recognizes that cancer will inevitably change how one “looks” to the world (50). Thus, the focus on presenting as one did before cancer is nothing more than creating a past state untouched by cancer. Deploying the term “alien” also signals the distance a woman feels from her present body when employing prosthetics (p. 50). Lorde reads prosthetics as methods to negate the present state of one’s life, of one’s body. This negation is further emphasized by the use of the word “guilt” which signals how women are expected to experience their cancer in silence (p. 50). Lorde’s language shows the layered complexities: reconfiguring the body and its relationship to society now that the body is cancerous, negotiating the present, and contending with grief. Recognizing disability in the present enables her to imagine a future in which disability exists as an embodied component of life rather than a position to overcome.

 

The Gendered Ill Subject

The Cancer Journals offer not only a critique on how sickness is expected to be performed, but also suggests how one’s gender must be performed even while sick. Feminist disability scholar Susan Wendell (1989) writes, “We need a feminist theory of disability, both because 16% of women are disabled, and because the oppression of disabled people is closely linked to the cultural oppression of the body” (p. 104). For Wendell the construction of disability is attached to the construction of gender since, when we recognize a body, we assume a gender and a capacity of the body. Much like recognizing how sexism functions would liberate gendered bodies, Wendell notes that recognizing how ableism is deployed could liberate the body.  Likewise, Lorde disrupts dialogue about her body as a medicalized being; she also offers insights into how acceptable gender performances are attached to able-bodied performance.

How the entanglement of disability and gender is perceived in a body could be understood in ways dominant society others bodies that violate norms of gender and ability. Once a body is seen as Other, it can then be dehumanized. Lorde’s writing describes how her black, sick, female body becomes a site of social anxiety for those who encounter her. After her mastectomy Lorde writes of an encounter with a woman from Reach for Recovery: “She was also a woman of admirable energies who clearly would uphold and defend to the death those structures of society that had allowed her a little niche to shine in” (p. 34). Lorde’s language signals this woman as a representative of a larger system, one that prioritizes a normative gender presentation. The “admirable energies” the woman possesses are being used to perpetuate a system of performance, specifically a performance of ablebodied womaness. The phrase “to the death” is key here. Lorde signals for her audience that she knows ability and gender are societal structures and without the fighting this woman does, the structure would be obsolete. For Lorde, gender is a system requiring constant maintenance.

What is also suggested to Lorde by the Reach for Recovery worker is not only that gender is a system requiring upkeep, but also that one’s gender is a performance for onlookers. In other words, one’s gender presentation is primarily for one’s audience. Lorde comments, “Her message was, you are just as good as you were before because you can look exactly the same” (p. 34). The woman equates goodness with the ability to perform as one’s prior self. Thus, if one can remember one’s historical performances, one can stay “good.” This goodness is evaluated by others as seen when Lorde writes, “I knew sure as hell I’d know the difference” (34). Lorde is not interested in presenting her body in capacities that ignore her cancer/what cancer has required her to lose, specifically in this case her breast. Earlier in The Cancer Journals Lorde writes, “I would lie if I did not also speak of loss. Any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated into a new sense of self” (p. 9). For Lorde, her gender has not shifted since having cancer, her entire self has. Whereas the Reach for Recovery worker is interested in putting Lorde back into her body with two visible breasts, Lorde is invested in exploring what her body is at present. Her goal is integration, to pull all of who she was into who she is presently. This act is for her, not for those evaluating her.

What is insightful about the encounter with the Reach for the Recovery worker are the ways breasts are imagined. Interestingly, the Reach for Recovery worker never comments on why Lorde should present with two breasts. Perhaps the worker assumed as women there is an understanding that one should desire such a look. As the conversation between Lorde and the worker unfolds, having a prosthetic breast becomes code for a certain kind of woman, not just one who is not sick. The worker, who also has a prosthetic breast, asks Lorde if she can tell which of her breasts is a prosthesis. Lorde writes in response, “I admitted that I could not. In her tight foundation garment and stiff, up-lifting bra, both breasts looked equally unreal to me. But then I’ve always been a connoisseur of women’s breasts, and never overly fond of still uplifts” (p. 35). For Lorde, breasts are a site of desire. Her attraction to breasts is due to their connection to women. But, for the Reach for Recovery worker, breasts are part of one’s body that must present in a specific way, a way that does not look like breasts without enhancements. Lorde uses the word “uplift” here to signal the kind of breast presentation the worker presents with and believes all women should present with. This performance is one that, for Lorde, is a form of disembodiment. Lorde knows an uplift does not equal breasts; it is an enhancement, like the prosthetic she is being coaxed to wear. Rejecting the uplift and the prosthetic informs us that for Lorde, breasts are not for onlookers, but for an intimacy with oneself as a site of desire.

While reflecting, Lorde addresses what losing her breast means. While she wonders if her partner will find her body desirable, she is more concerned with the kinds of sensations she will experience. Lorde writes, “My right breast represented such an area of feeling and pleasure for me, how could I bear to never feel that again” (p. 36). Her concern is not about how her body now looks, but rather, what kind of erotic pleasure is possible in the space where her breast was. Lorde’s language is not about how her body looks fully clothed to herself or others. But, rather, she contemplates what the possibilities are for intimacy with a lack of a body part that once provided her pleasure. For Lorde, being a woman is about being able to experience pleasure, rather than being able to pleasure others in how one performs.

 

Conclusion: Debility and State Control of Embodied Narratives

Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, a genre-bending text, documents the complicated relationship between the body, illness, and the social and medical institutions that impact the experience of having cancer.  Beyond the quality of writing that takes place throughout the text, Lorde’s journals are exceptional for the way they attend to the future, a future that acknowledges and challenges the presence of illness in her life. And yet, despite the moves Lorde makes to craft her own embodied futurity, she recognizes that she? is and always will be limited by state control and its understanding of chronic illness.

As Lorde notes throughout The Cancer Journals, one’s future is situated against the lives of other humans. However, she urges her audience to position futures as a concept that correlates to bodily acceptance. Lorde claims, “The real truth is that certain people feel better with that lump stuck in my bra, because they do not have to deal with me nor themselves in terms of morality nor in terms of difference” (57). For Lorde, investigating one’s own body ensures a future, and this is a tactic that disability studies scholars can center to envision a crip futurity. The imperative for this is high, as the alternative “reinforce(s) our own isolation and invisibility from each other, as well as the false complacency of a society which would rather not face the results of its own insanities” (Lorde, 54). An embodied crip futurity is aware of not only the impact illness and disability have on the body at present, but the way it shapes the future moving forward. In this, there is a possibility for coalition and community, for critiquing larger structures of society that disable, and for disabled people to embrace their embodied experiences.

 

 

References

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