During the writing of a paper recently, I came across an article about the disability aesthetics of breast cancer. Having just gone through the whole ordeal myself, I found myself especially touched by the author’s concepts and arguments.
The author, Nadine Ehlers, focuses her observations on the work of David Jay’s The SCAR Project, a series of raw photographs of people who have undergone treatment for breast cancer, which is almost always disfiguring in some way. As Ehlers (2015)1 writes, “Physical deformity, disfigurement, and the bodily grotesque are generally understood as ‘disabilities’ in the broader social arena. (p. 331)” The Americans with Disabilities Act would back her up as its definition of disability includes those who are ‘regarded as having such an impairment’ just as much as those who in fact embody them.
I’m still struggling with where to place my breast cancer journey among my ideas of disability identity. Indeed, chronic illness is very much within the umbrella of disability, and honestly, once a cancer patient, always a cancer patient. It’s not usually a one-and-done type of deal. There are typically consequences and complications of treatment, as well as ongoing vigilance for recurrence.
Yet, for me, it feels utterly distinct from my otherwise established identity as a disabled person. Perhaps it is simply a matter of time, allowing the reality to settle more deeply into my psyche. After all, I’m only just barely out of treatment and do not yet know what my future cancer story looks like. Even with my permanent physical disabilities, it took me a very long time to come to identify as a disabled person, at all, let alone with pride.
My body has been disfigured by cancer. There is no getting around that. Personally, and much of my crip community agrees, I think it’s been changed for the sexier. However, that says more about my friends’ aesthetic priorities than it does about the nondisabled public in general. I believe the average nondisabled citizen would look upon me with pity for having lost my femininity somehow. It is true that I no longer have nipples, and there are huge scars across and beneath both my breasts. However, those aren’t the characteristics that define me as a woman, let alone a person. Don’t get me wrong: I’m very attached to having breasts. I chose to go through the long, arduous, and painful process of reconstruction after a double mastectomy, in large part because they do loom so large in my identity as a femme queer woman.
Yet, as Ehlers (2015) points out, “Such disfigurement is largely compelled to remain hidden from public view: the anomalous, maimed, or ‘ugly’ body is rarely displayed unless, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has shown, it appears within and via the logics of freakery, aberrance, or sentimentality” (p. 331). To claim it as beauty is to remove it from the freak show and shine a light on a disability aesthetic—namely, a set of aesthetic values that doesn’t prioritize the body of the normate (Garland-Thomson, 2011).2
I’ll delve more deeply into the disability aesthetics of breast cancer, specifically, in another post.
- Ehlers, Nadine. “The SCAR Project: Disability Aesthetics of Dis-Ease.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 9, no. 3 (2015): 331–47. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2015.26. ↩︎
- Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 591–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01206.x. ↩︎
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