"A Female Outcry Against Preventable Cancers"

(Audre Lorde.  Copyright Dagmar Schultz)

CW: cancer, rape

After receiving a mastectomy for malignant breast cancer, Audre Lorde mourns the loss of her right breast.  She writes in The Cancer Journals, most ardently, "I alone own my feelings. I can never lose [the feeling of her breast] because I own it, because it comes out of myself" (Lorde 79).  Does Lorde claim ownership of her feelings and her body only after suffering great loss?  The knowledge that Lorde gained through her relationship with breast cancer helped her de-center fear as a way of knowing and owning her body.  Throughout The Cancer Journals, I was awed of how Lorde’s poise and strength withstood her loss.

As a scholar, I am interested in the nexus of "preventable cancers" and marginalized bodies.  When do women learn to own their bodies?  Is this ownership intuitive? Or does it need to be confronted in the wake of disempowerment or loss? Only after great physical loss, a loss of her own organ, Lorde writes that she claims the feelings of her body as her own.  Lorde then concludes The Cancer Journals saying, "I would have never chosen this path, but I am glad to be who I am, here." Does suffering a great loss help Lorde claim ownership?

Earlier in the journals, Lorde wrote that she had no real model for going through breast cancer as a "black lesbian feminist poet."  The experience of breast cancer was not necessarily generalizable to all bodies and she wondered how it would manifest on her own, but had no standard to look to.  Even today, several decades following Lorde’s journals, discussion of breast cancer is often silenced or curbed by fear.  There are pink t-shirts in memoriam and races for raise money for a cure, but are there conversations? Lorde writes that the “silencing and political repression by establishment medical journals keep vital information about breast cancer underground and away from the women whose lives it most affects” (74).  The cultural hype surrounding breast cancer seems to cluster around finding a cure and honoring women who have passed, but conversations surrounding prevention are largely silent. Why must women endure breast cancer at all?

The rhetoric of "preventable diseases" is contradictory.  On one hand, advocacy for prevention allows women to take control of their health and their bodies. Lorde hoped to empower other women in the wake of her loss, concluding that "every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself actively in her own health" and that every woman should have fair access to information about carcinogens (75). But is empowerment enough?  Lorde also recognized that the "preventable disease" replicates a victim-blaming paradigm. Lorde discussed her own relationship with breast cancer and feelings of guilt and shame.  She revealed feelings of regret, wondering if there was anything she should have done differently to prevent the cancer.  Does the notion that breast cancer is often “preventable” blame women who are already suffering? Who can prevent cancer and who can't?

Lorde wrote that she hoped to use her journals as a point of connection for "other women of all ages, colors, and sexual identities who recognize that imposed silence about any area of our lives as a tool for separation and powerlessness" (7).  I thought about the ways that women are confronted with “preventable” violations of their own bodies and I wondered: who needs to be empowered?  Women who are suffering? Women who can circumvent suffering?  And how does personal empowerment address breast cancer as a systemic disease?

I see this same rhetoric used in the silences of rape culture. I emphasize silences, and not conversations, because similarly to breast cancer, I feel like the cultural discussion around rape culture is misaligned. However, the rhetoric surrounding rape culture centers around prevention, not healing.  It is interesting, too, that Finding A Cure for breast cancer is never about healing. It’s about clean-cut, mechanical solutions. It’s not about the process of healing from a body that has been violated. It’s about obscuring the process of healing as hard work.

Do I own my feelings and my body? I am using my own experience as a source, intentionally, to honor the personal praxis that Lorde embodies.  I am not trying to emblemize the lived experiences of violated bodies, as Lorde expertly diverts in her own narrative.  I am merely trying to echo the notion that healing is labor. Breast cancer is greater than the sum of every loss my body knows, but through Lorde's writing, I feel a solidarity.

My ownership of my body rose out of cultural silences and gaps.  I remember what it was like to wake up and not know if I had been raped.  At first, I brushed the situation off as nothing.  Rape was such a heavy word to heave. I didn’t feel comfortable claiming a word that’s so embedded in other people’s suffering.  What if I used it and I was wrong?  What if I was just exaggerating? The guilt kept me silent. How could I start a conversation when I wasn’t comfortable using language?  What else was there to say? Why was there only one word for rape when so many people suffer?

The silence got to me.  Was I raped “enough” to use the language?  I simply wanted to know.  I boated these questions over the margins of books and of Internet searches.  I looked for spectrums of rape, but everything told me that consent was clear and simple.  It didn’t feel simple to me then. 

I tried so hard to empirically know.  Could I feel it in body or my mind?  What did it feel like to wake up in a violated body?  And then I realized - I knew.  Living in a violated body was the only way I knew how to navigate the world.  My body had never been for myself and I had never claimed it.  I feel it in how Lorde simply states, “Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them,” (65-66). As a teenager, my body was in constant flux. I lost over fifty pounds in high school and my body always felt unfamiliar. I needed to claim my body, even if it was always changing. I needed to claim my body not to prevent instances of rape, but in order to heal.