Part 1 of 4
Let’s return now to Ehlers’s (2015)1 article reflecting on the SCAR Project. As she proclaims in her article, a disability aesthetic framing of breast cancer “demands an ethical witnessing to the realities of the disease and its disabling effects (whether that be due to surgery, treatment, or their aftermath)” (p. 332)
Breast cancer, like many disabilities and chronic illnesses, inhabits the strange position of both being overrepresented in media, while simultaneously being overly misrepresented. As Bérubé (2015)2 so succinctly puts it, disability “is almost always taken as a sign of something else.” (p. 154) By this, he means that, for example, antagonists are often portrayed as physically disabled in some way to be representative of their immoral or evil nature.
In the case of breast cancer, that massive influx of misrepresentation often comes in the form of “sentimentality and infantilism”. (p. 333) Ehlers expands on this notion and its real-world impact further, stating:
“…norms of femininity are upheld through an infantilizing cuteness and a focus on the sentimental, while dominant standards of idealized feminine beauty remain unquestioned; disease is potentially tamed and normalized (through its consumption), precisely because of the ubiquity of pink-ribbon campaigning; and the actual realities of the body with breast cancer, the disabling effects of the disease, suffering, and death are erased at worst and deferred at best.” (p. 333)
Even the practice of calling us “survivors” can be called into question for multiple reasons. Firstly, I don’t wish to be in battle with my body. I choose to love it and care for it, not conquer it. I have not survived the cancer. I have survived the medical treatment and psychological uneasiness that comes with facing one’s mortality. Secondly, the “representative ‘survivor’ is largely depicted as white, straight, and reproductive, and is framed as having “conquered” cancer through militant self-care, optimism, and adherence to biomedical protocols.” (p. 333)
I don’t mean to take away the label of survivor to those who find solace and strength in their cancer journey. It is, after all, a “key way of coping with the ambiguities of diagnosis and prognosis.” (p. 333) I think that perhaps my misgivings have more to do with the people surrounding the person with cancer using the term survivor, not the affected individual themselves. Similar to how I’m fine with reclaiming the term “cripple” for myself, but would be hard-pressed to find it acceptable for a stranger off the street to use that term to describe me.
The reason it’s essential to discuss the aesthetics of breast cancer is that the way we view and represent the disease has very real consequences. It shifts how we see the disease as patients, caregivers, medical professionals, researchers, lawmakers, and as a society.
Saccharine pink ribbons hide away the disabling and disfiguring effects of breast cancer. It hides the bodily suffering endured by the treatment for this disease. These realities are “generally unseen: they are absent from the dominant aesthetic field and, as such, do not structure ways of knowing about breast cancer.” (p. 334) This hiding of disabling reality is no accident: traditional aesthetics demands that the aberrant be kept siloed in freak shows and havens of medicalization. This is so easily evidenced by the “overwhelming calls from the public to remove the [SCAR Project] images from circulation.” (p. 335)
In the SCAR Project, “the bodies represented confound normative standards of embodiment. Jay’s [the photographer] images defy the visual conventions and aesthetic ideal of a body that is whole, seamless, and unified.” (P. 337) By showing the reality of breast cancer treatment, “bodies with lost parts, bodies with parts out of order and rearranged through breast reconstruction, bodies burnt through radiation, and bodies threatened by mortality—these images signify the failure of normative morphology.” (p. 337) Our bodies no longer align with what is presumed to be normal.
To reside outside of normalcy and be open about it places a great amount of stress upon nondisabled minds. After all, we remind them that they could be next—more on that in the next 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. ↩︎
- Bérubé, Michael. “Representation.” In Keywords for Disability Studies. NYU Press, 2015. ↩︎
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