Part 2 of 4
I believe that part of the push toward painting everything a saccharine pink for “awareness” is, in part, a response to the dis-ease felt by nondisabled, non-diseased individuals. They are confronted with the reality that “all bodies are potentially subject to the threat of illness: the tenuousness of bodily and ontological certainty comes into sharp relief and such knowledge, in turn, threatens the illusion of self-mastery and bodily sovereignty” (Ehlers, 2015, p. 341)1. My breast cancer body is a reminder of their own fragility. So, everything gets pink-washed and turned into a battle.
In fact, cancer patients specifically are especially perilous to the non-diseased mind as, “rather than representing the body/self’s failure to defend against external forces (that could result in disease and/or forms of disability), it instead represents the impossibility of defending the self against the self” (Ehlers, 2015, p. 341). In other words, the call is coming from inside the house! (If you’ll excuse my pop culture reference to the 1996 movie, Scream.)
By focusing so heavily on the drive for a cure, it not only presents an “elusive biomedical ‘promise’ but also to deny or suspend the sheer terror, pain, suffering, and death that accompanies breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and the experience of life in prognosis” (Ehlers, 2015, p. 342). Yes, let’s continue researching a cure, but let’s not lose sight of the people affected in the process. For those of us living, and dying, without a tenuously promised future cure, our focus is on the barbarity of the treatment.
There is no “quick ‘cure’ for breast cancer but, rather, a range of disabling effects that follow from the disease and its treatment” (Ehlers, 2015, p. 342). Breast reconstruction, even when done beautifully and without complications, remains a disfiguring and painful process. There is no “correcting” this disability so that the body returns to its precancerous state.
My own body is representative of the best possible outcome for breast reconstruction: no complications, up a couple of cup sizes, high profile for that extra sex appeal. Yet, the process of getting here has taken several months of regular procedures, two surgeries, and months of painful recovery time. And yet, there remains a risk for implant failure. All it takes is one infection that isn’t caught in time, and all that work is lost.
I have 8-inch scars traveling up the middle of both breasts, no nipples, and another pair of 7-inch scars underneath each one. They may look hot as hell with a shirt on, but they are very obviously not my factory-installed breasts when my shirt comes off.
In the SCAR Project, “The viewer is called on to witness the failures, slippages, and complications that reconstruction efforts produce” and “although reconstruction might give the outward appearance of normative embodiment (especially when clothed), the lived corporeal reality offers no such conclusion” (Ehlers, 2015, p. 342).
Instead, much as the SCAR Project itself, our bodies remain “unfit for public consumption” (Ehlers, 2015, p. 343).
- 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. ↩︎
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