The Daily Breast

Starting up a new site.

I’ll be blogging over at The Daily Breast from here on out.

See you there.

A Portion of This Paper…

So I mentioned that I’ve been reading a lot (more) about cancer; I’m currently writing a seminar paper on 21st century women’s cancer narratives, which I’ll be turning into a conference paper to present on a panel at the Michigan Women’s Studies Association conference–“Leading the Way: Feminism, Education, and Social Change”– in March. I presented a version of this in class yesterday. Abstract below.

A Portion of This Paper Will Help Fight Breast Cancer: Women’s Cancer Narratives and Twenty-First Century Survivor Subjectivity

 The rise of the breast cancer narrative as a popular genre evolves largely out of the establishment, in 1985—and the subsequent commercial propagation—of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month: an annual cultural phenomenon sponsored by the pharmeceutical company AstraZeneca. The genre’s initial emergence in the 80s and 90s marks the emergence of a new subjectivity—the “politicized patient”—and a new genre: a Foucauldian “counternarrative to medical discourse.” [1]  In the twenty-five years since its inception, breast cancer awareness culture has moved from a model of a politicized patient to an increasingly commercialized one; adopted by corporate culture as a “cause,” breast cancer becomes a brand name. In the twenty-first century, the breast cancer narrative therefore demands not only a counternarrative to medical discourse, but a counternarrative to the commercial discourse in which women’s stories are used as useful marketing tools for the cultivation of the uniform subjectivity of “survivor.” Thirty years on from the publication of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, a second generation of female cancer patient subjectivity persists: a sentimentally politicized patienthood, carrying with it a ubiquitously commercialized, normalized ur-narrative of “survival.” In this paper, I explore the ways in which American women’s cancer narratives operate in the post-feminist twenty-first century, particularly how the “survivor” subjectivity is constructed, or deconstructed, against the backdrop of American commercial culture.

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[1] See Lisa Diedrich, Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 25-6.

Cancer? I laughed so hard I cried.

I’ve been reading a lot about cancer lately. As in, a lot more than usual. More on this later. For now, I just want to take a moment here to publicly profess my love for Tania Katan. I’ll admit, I was a little put off by the cupcake on the cover of her memoir, My One Night Stand With Cancer, when I picked it up alongside Geralyn Lucas’ Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy (which I’ll feign to reserve judgement on, as I’ve not yet read it).

But Tania. Katan. Kicks. Ass. Jewish, queer, BRCA-positive, comic, writer, two time breast cancer survivor (at 21 and 31). And she’s turned it into a one-woman show: Saving Tania’s Privates. Trailer:

I love women with cancer. I love funny women. Funny women with cancer…amazing.

Which is why I’m sort of enamored with this girl–author of the blog Cancer is Hilarious and the forthcoming “world’s awesomest comic book,” Terminally Illin’.

Welcome to my morning

On Jill

Per yesterday’s post, I randomly decided to check up on Jill’s blog at noon yesterday.

Today I find that, according to a post by her sister, Jill died two hours later.

Jill was diagnosed with Stage II triple negative breast cancer in 2004. It returned in 2009, having metastatized to her brain, lungs, and rib. She leaves behind a husband and a teenage son.

Inescapable

I’m in a study carrel at the University of Michigan library, and I want to scream and cry and kick the four walls of my enclosure.  

Yesterday during a break from class I opened up my New York Times homepage to find Elizabeth Edwards had died. This morning I woke up to Elizabeth Edwards’ voice on NPR, from an interview in which she calmly accepts her own death. She could not believe, she said, in a God who allows senseless tragedies to happen. A sixteen year old who dies in a car crash. And breast cancer. The swift erasure of so many women.

Today I procrastinate during paper writing by checking in with the blogosphere, to find that one of  the breast cancer bloggers from my blogroll, Jill, who has been living with Stage 4 triple-negative breast cancer, is in the hospital and not doing at all well. Her family is asking for prayers.

Breast cancer, I fucking hate you.

In our time (at our age): Facts & Figures

1. “During 2002-2006, women aged 20-24 had the lowest incidence rate, 1.4 cases per 100,000 women.”

2. “The 5-year relative survival rate is slightly lower among women diagnosed with breast cancer before age 40 (83%) compared to women diagnosed at ages 40 or older (90%). This may be due to tumors diagnosed at younger ages being more aggressive and less responsive to treatment.”

3. “Women with breast cancer also are at risk for developing a second primary cancer. There is a strong relationship between younger age at diagnosis of the primary breast cancer and risk of subsequent cancer. Women diagnosed with early-onset breast cancer (age <40) have almost a 3-fold increased risk of any subsequent cancer, with a 4.5-fold increased risk of subsequent breast cancer.”

Source: American Cancer Society Breast Cancer Facts and Figures, 2009-2010.

The oncologist has spoken to the gynecologist re: me.

Oncologist: the gynecologist thinks you’re depressed. Are you?

Is it any wonder?

She writes me a prescription for an antidepressant that causes headaches and tremors and hands me a radiology requisition for a chest x-ray as I’ve been complaining of chest/rib pain. I walk down to Radiology, then turn and walk out of the hospital. I tucked the x-ray requisition, along with the antidepressant prescription, into a copy of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic, where both have remained since.

I’m tired of tests and drugs.

My problem, I told her, is not a seratonin imbalance or a residual, inexplicable melancholy. My problem is cancer.

“How are you?” *punchface*

   A question a cancer patient can’t answer.

  The problem with providing answers or “updates” is that our conditions are mysteries to us too. We don’t know what’s couched in our bodies, or where, or when it will rear up again. People want to add their own neat  ending to the cancer narrative: “but you’re ok now, right?” Most often meaning: “but you have hair.”  

How am I? I don’t know.  In inexplicable pain, mostly. I might have uterine cancer. My ribs and chest and lungs ache a lot these days; my cancer might have metastasized  and I might die before I’m thirty.  

I also might be fine.

So in response, I just say “fine.”

Recently I had to explain to my boyfriend that chances of recurrance do not decrease by year–that chance of recurrence spikes at year 5 post-treatment. Also that metastasis is The End. Also that when I go to the doctor, it’s to monitor for a second primary cancer in the left breast, not to monitor for metastasis.  That you can’t monitor with blood tests or continual scans. That there’s no benefit to finding it “early.” That you can’t find it “early” anyway. He didn’t know these things. I felt like I’d punched him in the face. I may as well have.

But the reality is too much to bear. It’s easier to believe you’re living in a permanent state of ineffectual hypochondria, and of course you will go on, forever, forever.

There’s no cure for cancer.

If I found out I couldn’t have children, I wouldn’t want to live.

If I knew I was going to die within the next five years, ie. before finishing my Ph.D., what would I do about it? Probably nothing. What could I? But part of me wants to know, because hope can be an embarrassing thing, and I’d rather get it done with.

The New York Times Book Review recently ran a piece on the book The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. Excerpt:

 The oldest surviving description of cancer is written on a papyrus from about 1600 B.C. The hieroglyphics record a probable case of breast cancer: “a bulging tumor . . . like touching a ball of wrappings.” Under “treatment,” the scribe concludes: “none.”

 In Mukherjee’s words: “dying, even more than death, defines the illness.”

The other day I was reaching up on a high pile of books and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying fell down and hit me in the face. I’ve never read it. I feel like I don’t have to now. I know what  dying feels like. Like a punch in the face.

Dying Young

I shall live to be old, who feared I should die young
    I shall live to be old.
I shall cling to life as the leaves cling to the creaking oak
    In the rustle of the falling snow and the cold.

The other trees let loose their leaves on the air
    In their russet and red,
I have lived long enough to wonder which is best,
    And to envy sometimes the way of the early dead.

Sara Teasdale

—

Not all die early, dying young–
Maturity of Fate
Is consummated equally
In Ages, or a Night–

A Hoary Boy, I’ve known to drop
Whole statured — by the side
Of Junior of Fourscore–’twas Act
Not Period–that died.

Emily Dickinson

Pinktober, Take 2

I’ve not written here since beginning the Ph.D. this fall–unsurprising, I suppose, considering the how much else I’m supposed to be writing right now; but then, it is my mind’s constant confrontation with cancer that prevents me from getting things done. I’m not sure if this is biological–the destruction of my brain function from the chemo–or psychological, but either way, it is an omnipresent obstacle to my concentration, to my caring about anything. Always in the background of this program there is murmuring about the career trajectory–quals and prelims and dissertation and the academic job market six years from now. Six sick years.

It doesn’t help, of course, that it’s dreaded Pinktober–and though I’m not as angry as my first “survival” enounter with this media frenzy phenomenon, see rant c. 10/2009–I’m beset with inexpressible sadness and frustration every time I walk up to the library and have to step on pink ribbons rendered in sidewalk-chalk by cheerful sorority girls. The bitterness is there too, of course; I can’t help but half-imagine one of them getting breast cancer in her twenties, and see how many pink ribbons she’s graffiting campus with afterward.

Then you go into Borders just looking for a little Charlotte Bronte and see a display table packed with Chicken Soup for the Breast Cancer Survivor’s Soul.

 I’ve become fascinated by the photographs in David Jay’s exhibition The Scar Project , portraits of post-mastectomy breast cancer patients–“survivors,” he says–between the ages of 18 and 35. On his website, Jay says:

  “For these young women, having their portrait taken seems to represent their personal victory over this terrifying disease. It helps them reclaim their femininity, their sexuality, identity and power after having been robbed of such an important part of it. Through these simple pictures, they seem to gain some acceptance of what has happened to them and the strength to move forward with pride.”

I’m uncomfortable with this rhetoric of rescue via male-photographer-facilitated exhibition (“Through these simple pictures, they seem to gain some acceptance”).What would Judith Butler have to say about the male gaze here, one wonders? However, I think Jay’s project is important in showing bodies. In them, I don’t necessarily see the fierce Amazonian warrior-woman society wants to see in the “survivor,” so that they can close themselves off to the implications of illness and intimations of death: a warm-and-fuzzy “pink” feeling–a modern manifestation, I think of, sentimentality’s commodity culture (I have been reading the incomporable Lauren Berlant of late)–that precludes any desire to participate in breast cancer politically, to any actual effect.

I regret having had reconstruction. But that is another post.

“Breast cancer is not a pink ribbon,” Jay asserts on the site. At least we’ve got that right here.

The question, though: is Jay’s photographic exhibition an act of exhibitionism?  Speaking of which, I came across this “Tattoos for the Maimed and Handicapped” post on the “Bizarre Stuff” blog; the first photo  is of two mastectomy tattoos. Mastectomy as “maiming”? Mastectomy as “handicap”? The blog enthusiastically invites the voyeuristic gaze of the freak show audience, wide eyed, rubbernecked, finger-pointing, delighted and appalled; I can practically hear it:

Cancer, cancer everywhere and not thing to think.

I have much more to say, but I think this post has reached an appropriate length. Keep posted, and I will post more.