Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer LiteratureWomen have been writing about cancer for decades, but since the early 1990s, the body of literature on cancer has increased exponentially as growing numbers of women face the searing realities of the disease and give testimony to its ravages and revelations. Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature surveys a wide range of contemporary writing about breast, uterine, and ovarian cancer, including works by Marilyn Hacker, Margaret Edson, Carole Maso, Audre Lorde, Eve Sedgwick, Mahasweta Devi, Lucille Clifton, Alicia Ostriker, Jayne Anne Phillips, Terry Tempest Williams, and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. DeShazer's readings bring insights from body theory, performance theory, feminist literary criticism, French feminisms, and disability studies to bear on these works, shining new light on a literary subject that is engaging more and more writers. "An important and useful book that will appeal to people in a variety of fields and walks of life, including scholars, teachers, and anyone interested in this subject." --Suzanne Poirier, University of Illinois at Chicago "A book on a timely and important topic, wisely written beyond scholarly boundaries and crossing many theoretical and disciplinary lines." --Patricia Moran, University of California, Davis |
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Contents
| 1 | |
Embodying Cancer | 52 |
Resistance | 82 |
Popular Fiction Cancer the Romance | 135 |
Memory Desire | 173 |
SelfRepresentation Commonality | 217 |
The Cultural Work of Womens Cancer Literature | 261 |
Works Cited | 277 |
Index | 291 |
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Common terms and phrases
acknowledges agency appears argues become body breast cancer called cancer patients cause claims confront consider continues cultural daughter death describes desire diagnosis disease domestic dying Ellen embodiment erotic experience explains explore face fear feel female femininity feminist fiction final further gender hand human identity imagines insists language lesbian literature lives look Lorde Louise lover Maso mastectomy means memory metaphors mother move narrative narrator never notes novel nurse offers once Ostriker pain play poems poet political present protagonists questions readers reconstruction refuses remains represent representations resistance reveals rhetoric Ruth scar sense serves sexual shared story subjectivity suffering surgery Susan takes tell texts theory things thought tion treatment turn ultimately voice woman women women's cancer writing
Popular passages
Page 132 - Two Are Better Than One ... For If They Fall, the One Will Lift Up His Fellow; But Woe to Him That Is Alone When He Falleth, For He Hath Not Another to Help Him Up.
Page 49 - Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. (4)
Page 278 - You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language
Page 49 - refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being
Page 21 - there is a charge For the hearing of my heart— It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
Page 268 - Experience is the process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed. Through that process one places oneself or is placed in social reality and so perceives and comprehends as subjective ... those relations—material, economic, and interpersonal—which are in fact social, and, in
Page 11 - Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens ofthat other place. —Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor I
Page 49 - fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being
Page 207 - I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature |
| Author | Mary K. DeShazer |
| Publisher | University of Michigan Press, 2010 |
| ISBN | 047202468X, 9780472024681 |
| Length | 312 pages |
| Subjects | › Literary Criticism / Feminist Literary Criticism / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |