Cartwright Breast

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Abstract

In this article, I consider how comm unities form around health care advo-

cacy and activism . M y concer n is the place of visual media in the politics

of breast cancer. Ar t photography and lm are considered against main-

stream images and m edia cam paigns focusing on breast cancer. The prima ry

work considered is the self-portrait photography of the artist Matuschka

and the lm The Body Beautifulby N gozi O nw ura h. I argue that thesealternative texts help us to think about the ways in which issues such as

race, age and beauty are key aspects in the experience of breast cancer, and

not tangential cultural issues or appearance-related side effects , as one

breast cancer su pport program m e puts it.

Keywords breast cance r; co m munity ; body; m ed ia; mastect omy;

photography

IT WO U LD B E impossible to understand health cultures in the US without

acknowledging the crucial role of media in their formation. Television, print

med ia, cinem a, online discussion groups and m edical educational computer pro-

gram s are impor tant, if underconsidered me ans through which health issues are

taught, comm unicated and lived. This article considers a few examples of breast

cancer media produced by women who identify as activists, alternative media

produ cers and me mbe rs of the com mun ity of wom en affected by breast cancer.

First, though, I want to address some of the problems that have made it difcultto think through questions of identity and community around health culture

without also considering the role of me dia (lm, print media, photography, video

and digital technolog ies) in the incorp oration of illness and survival as aspects of

identity and comm unity. In the discussion that follows, I try to dem onstrate the

importance of focusing on local or minor media productions work by inde-

pendent or alternative media producers, personal video and ar t photography

rather than m ainstream m edia. As I will try to dem onstrate below, the concepts

Lisa Cartwright

COMMUNITY AND THE P UB LIC

B ODY IN B REAS T CANCER MEDIA

ACTIVIS M

C ULT U R A L S T UD IE S 1 2 ( 2 ) 1 9 9 8 , 1 1 7 1 3 8 Routledge 1998

j Articles


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of community and media function in highly specic ways within health cultures,

dem anding analytic strategies that take into account the specicity of media user s

and audiences.

Health and com mu nity

Arenas of political action d evoted to health care, illness and disability historically

have for me d on the basis of collective responses to exper iences with illness and

the health care system. Advocacy and activist groups, self-help and support

groups, and mo re loosely based networks of individuals organized on the basis

of shared experiences which might include having a particular illness and/ortreatment, protesting lack of access to medical treatment, advocating for

research, m anaging pain, needing emotional support, negotiating loss of bodily

functions, identifying as a survivor, confronting iatrogenic illness, facing ongoing

disability, or doing support work or caregiving. W hereas broad social networks

have form ed around breast cancer generally (for examp le, the National Breast

Cancer Coalition (NBC C)), groups have also organized themselves on the basis

of these m ore delimited issues as well as on the ba sis of identity or region (the

Chicago Lesbian Comm unity Cancer Project, or the Atlanta-based N ationalBlack Wom ens Health Project). W hat are the implications of using the terms

identityan d communityto refer to g roups that coalesce around illness and/o r dis-

ability? There are impo rtant discontinuities between health status as a category

of identity or com mu nity and the mo re familiar identity categories of ethnicity,

race, nationality, gender, class and sexuality. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson

present a version of current thinking on com mun ity form ation that helps me to

access this issue. They state:

something like a transnational public sphere has rendered any strictly

bound ed sense of com munity or locality obso lete . At th e same tim e, it has

enabled the creation of for ms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on

an appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are

paramount.

(Ferguson and Gupta, 1992: 9)

In the fragmented world of postmodernity, Gupta and Ferguson argue, space

has been reorganized in a way that forces us fundamentally to rethink the poli-

tics of comm unity, solidarity and cultural difference. They m ake this point w ith

regard to an issue w herein space its occupation and its ownership is essen-

tial in a particular way: they are concerned w ith the establishmen t of groups

such as displaced and stateless peoples, ethnic groups, exiles, refugees and

m igrants. But wh at are the implications of this idea of the obsolescence of

bounded com munity an d lo cal ity w hen we consid er collective identi ty as it

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S1 1 8


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forms , provisionally, on the basis of illness, disability and the ght for access to

treatment? Do reterritorialized space and transcultural formations become

m etaphors, or is there a parallel reconguration and dispersal of collective iden-

tity in the postmodern experience of breast cancer? For example, would it beaccurate to describe sur vivors of breast can cer as a transcultural or transnational

com mun ity because breast cancer strikes wom en of all classes, ethnicities and

nationalities?

Comm unity form ation on the basis of health and illness is always highly

provisional and unstable, in part because group form ation takes place on the basis

of a condition or experience that is always strongly determined by more con-

ventional identity categories. Illness is not necessarily attached to, but must

always be lived through, other categories of identity and com mu nity categoriesthat come into play at every level of the construction of publics and cultures

around disease. In short, illness may take on the trappings of an identity category;

it may be the basis for the form ation of a (highly conditional) comm unity, and it

m ay be the grounds for the form ation of a public sphere. Bu t the experiences and

cultures of illnesses none the less are always lived through identity positions and

arenas of public and professional discourse that exceed the fram eworks and cu l-

tures of disease. This is further com plicated by the fact that illness com mun ities

are comprised of people whose respective identities as ill or disabled shiftthroughout the course of a disease. W ithin breast cancer com mun ities, one might

occupy the position of caregiver, patient and sur vivor at different po ints in time,

or even simultaneously.

While distinctions among these positions are fairly well acknowledged

within groups formed around health issues, differentials of class, cultural iden-

tity, ethnicity and sexuality are quite often bracketed in o rder to und erscore the

unifying factor of disease. The online breast cancer listserv, for example, is com -

prised of wom en with breast cancer, survivors and their caregivers (doctors,health professionals, hospice workers, friends and family). The individuals who

par ticipate in this forum forge conditional bonds on the ba sis of their day-to-day

experiences. But this kind of transcultural alliance some times problem atically

fulls the cond itions of H aberm ass concept of a liberal public sphe re, rather than

becom ing an increasingly m ore in teract ive, less rig id ly class -, race- an d nat ion-

based m ode l of a public. In bro ad-b ased groups like th e breast ca ncer listserv or

the NBC C, participants from disparate backg rounds bracket cultural differences

on the basis of a com m on experience with breast cancer. This approach is to be

lauded for its emph asis on the pervasive scope o f the disease, but it provides

limited me ans for addressing the class and c ultural specicity of the experience,

diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer among women of different ages,

econom ic groups, regions and designated races. Following the mod el of white

middle-class womens organizations in the 1970s and earlier, broad-based

support groups tacitly uphold the liberal fantasy of a quasi-universal discourse

among women.

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What I am arguing against here is the idea that disease is the great leveller,

or that coalition po litics can or sho uld sm ooth over differences as they im pact on

experiences of disease and disability. M uch o f m ainstream b reast cancer me dia

so far has elided these differences. For this reason, I have chosen to focus on m ediatexts that empha size the sp ecicity of different wom ens experiences w ith breast

cancer. The work I have singled out for attention falls into the categories of

alternative or activist media. R ather than looking at material like public service

advertisements, Primetime feature stories and Lifetime television specials, I will

be consider ing act iv is t and ar t ph oto gra phy an d vid eo. Before turning to this

work, however, I want to look more closely at some presuppositions that often

accompany the analysis of non-mainstream media.

H ealth care and alternative m edia

The a nalysis of activist media often relies on a binary m odel that sets off local,

oppositional, comm unity-based groups against the globalizing force of main-

stream m edicine and m edia institutions. M uch recent health care activism,

however, crosses the boundaries between these two spheres. Groups like ACT

UP (AIDS Coali tion to Unleash Power) and the NBCC include among the irmembers media and medical professionals with entrenched institutional prac-

tices as well as patients and lay advocates. In m any areas of political organizing,

alliances, however uneasy, have been forged across genders, classes, professions

and cultures. W hat is new here is not w hat counts as comm unity or coalition,

but the fact th at the crisis of il lness, and not an aspec t of shared id en ti ty in the

conventional sense, is the basis for alliance. In the past decade we have seen an

unprecedented degree of inuence over medical policy brought to bear by

medical countercultures com posed of patients, activists and nonprofessionalcaregivers. The very idea of a counterculture as an extra-institutional force

beco mes com plica ted w hen we consid er th is trafc betwee n th e medical pro fe s-

sions and activist groups and the role of laypersons in policy m aking.

Some of the more signicant media activity shaping US health culture is

taking place through advocacy, activist and com mun ity health groups using visual

me dia as a prime for m of public intervention. It is essential to consider how

agents within these arenas gain a public voice; how they acqu ire access to decision

ma king at the level of the institution or the state; and w hat the relationship is

between m ed ia pro ductions th at orig inate from a po si tion of ac tivism or

com mu nity politics (AID S videos, breast cancer awareness pam phlets) and those

that originate w ithin minor public spheres w hose position at the m argins of

public culture does not necessarily stem from oppression, or from a stance of

opposition. Progressive work in medicine is not necessarily com ing only from

practices identied as coun tercultural or as oppositional, as I w ill try to dem on-

strate below in the case of the work of photo grapher M atuschk a. W hen we look



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at the interaction am ong various media for ms (political cinem a, m ainstream pho -

tojourna lism) and various public constituencies, it becomes difcult to theorize

media activism as a unitary sphere situated outside institutional medicine, or

outside a m ass public culture.Viewed in this light, the binaries of a public and a counterp ublic, m ainstream

and activist politics become less than productive analytic mod els. The se for mu -

lations parallel the media studies binaries of broadcasting and narrowcasting,

mainstream media and alternative media. The terms counterpublic or countercul-

tures suggest oppositionality, w hen in fact m any alternative publics are forged

around the increasingly fragmented special interests that constitute the global

market. Likewise, the term narrowcast implies ma rginality of those cultures tar-

geted (ethnic groups, special interest groups, exilic cultures, language groups,and so on), whe n in fact these groups are often com prised of nancially and

politically powerful, if num erically small, sectors of the view ing public.1

W ithin media studies, the concept of the local mo re often appears in writ-

ings about alternative me dia production, decentralized com munity-based pro-

gramm ing, and activist m edia. The term carries connotations of appropriation

and resistance to mainstream media politics and institutionally sanctioned uses

of technology. If muc h of the literature on m edia assumes a singular mo nolithic

form , failing to account for the specic conditions of discrete media for m s anduses, w ritings about alternative m edia often construc t the ip side of that ima ge

what Coco Fusco (1 98 8) has dubbed fantasies of opposit ion ality , tota li zing

accounts of resistant media strategies that do not take into account the partial

and specic constituen cies, locations and effects of particular media inter ven-

tions.

In the case of the breast cancer me dia texts I consider below, gender, class

and cu ltural identity becom e key factors in the form ation of distinct pu blic cul-

tures around breast cancer. M oreover, I argue, within these cultures, there is nounitary concept of breast cancer. The disease is represented and lived through

issues such as class, beauty, fashion and ageing. Emotions such as anger, pain and

fear are tied to the correlated effects of disease and ageing, hair loss through

chemotherapy, and the physical, visible transform ation of that iconic and

fetishized body part, the breast. Audre Lorde emphasized this cultural aspect of

bre as t cancer in The Cancer Journals (1980) when she criticized other one-

bre as ted wom en fo r h id ing beh in d th e m ask of prosthesis or the dan gerous

fantasy of reconstruction promulgated by groups like Reach to Recovery, the

Am erican C ancer Societys signature programme for women with breast cancer

(Lorde, 1980: 16). R2R, developed by breast cancer patient Therese Lasser in

1952 (when the Halsted radical mastectomy was the conventional treatment),

was based on the then radically new idea that laywomen who had experienced

bre as t cancer could provid e a unique kind of emotio nal support for o ther wom en

in recovery. In ofcially adop ting this programm e in 1969, the ACS placed certain

topics off lim its for discussion, such as family relationships, doctors and the scar



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itself, em phasizing instead the goal of convincing wom en with mastectom ies that

they do no t have a handicap bu t a condition from w hich they can recover given

the right attitude, clothes and prosthesis. Lorde cautioned that this sort of cos-

metic sham would underm ine the sense of comm unity and solidarity necessaryfor wom en w ith breast cancer to organize effectively (Lorde, 1980: 16).2

The circumstances that Lorde described in 1980 the depoliticizing cos-

metic cover-up of not just the (missing or altered) breast but the cultural and

personal difculties surrounding the disease and its aftermath have taken on

new proport ions. In 1988, the ACS launched Look Good, Feel Better , an ini-

tiative cond ucted jointly w ith a charitable found ation set up by cosm etic manu -

facturers in w hich wom en receiving breast cancer treatmen t are invited to their

hospitals for LGFB programmes, essential ly group m akeover workshops inwh ich they get tips on suc h things as devising stylish head coverings and ap ply-

ing makeup. Anthropologist Janelle Taylor, in a critique of the m arketing of

beau ty products to women under th e guise of char ity, de scrib es an LGFB adver-

tisement that appeared in Mirabella concer ning appearance-related side effects

of breast cancer . The advertisemen t argues that W hen you give yourself an ori-

ginal Oscar de la Renta design, youre not the only one w ho gets som ething

beau ti fu l . . . yo ure helping in th e gh t ag ainst breast cancer. . . . So g ive. And

get (quoted in Taylor, 1994: 30). Often m arketed in the conjuncture of breastcancer and fashion are particular items which take on status as fetish and icon

(the scarf as a means of concealment and ador nment, standing in for lost hair;

the shoe as a fetish object par excellence). A similar message is conveyed in an ad

for Larry Stuart shoes, part of a spread promoting the autumn 1994 three-day

charitable event of the Fashion Footwear Association of New York (or FFANY,

an acronym that suggests displaced attention from the breast to the buttocks).

The event, sponsored by 800 comp anies, was a shoe sale held at the Plaza Hotel

in New York. The advertisement presents a photograph of m ud-covered hikingboots w ith th e cap tion th ese are fo r war . Below th is is a second image of shoe s

classy blac k suede T-s trap pumps w ith a m atchin g evenin g bag. These sh oes,

the advertiseme nt tells us, are for the w ar on breast cancer .

If these are par t of the uniform for the war on breast cancer, we might ask

the question: W here is the battleground? Ap parently the foot that comes dow n

against breast cancer , to borrow a line from the Larry Stuart advertisement, is

shod in the signiers of conser vative fem ininity. M y issue w ith this advertisement

is not that it suggests that activists m ight wear heels, or that I think corporate

America is not a viable battleground for cancer activism (it most certainly is).

Rather, it is part of a broader trend in which liberal and right-w ing camp aigns

appropriate the strategies and language of more progressive campaigns and

movements, changing their constituencies and goals in the process. It has been

widely acknowledged that AIDS activism of the 1980s and early 1990s was a

model for the development of a broad-based campaign against breast cancer in

the 1990s. But wh ereas in the 1980s A IDS activism was hardly a ma instream



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campaign, by 1996 breast cancer has emerged, in the words of journalist Lisa

Belkin (1996), as the years hot charity.

Lorde (1980) argued that the socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely

another way of keeping wom en with breast cancer silent and separate from eachother. The advertiseme nt and programm es of the 1990s d escribed above, all of

w hich prom ote beauty aids as prosthetic m eans of recovery, suggest instead that

the m edia cultures of fashion and b eauty technolog ies do provide a resource for

com munity building. However, this process appears to be occurring predom i-

nantly among those women concerned about breast cancer who are invested in

conventional notions of gender, body and b eauty. The problem we face is not that

women are depoliticized, silent or separate, but that the media-savvy breast

cancer activism that has em erged in the late 19 90s constructs the breast cancercom munity around a set of signiers that includes white, straight, middle and

upper class, urban, educated, professional and conservative. In addition to mar-

ginalizing wom en w ho are poor or working class and/or less well educated (and

w ho are less likely to have access to inform ation and treatment), this concep t of

com mun ity also fails to acknow ledge the lifestyles and con cerns of wom en who

do no t share the politics, fashion p references or sexual orientation of the collec-

tive prole tacitly gene rated by this m edia cam paign.

In the texts I consider below, alternative med ia producers take up breastcancer via beauty and fashion in reective and innovative ways to provide new,

non -norm ative ways of constructing the post-operative body. The form ation of

communities and public cultures on the basis of breast cancer politics entails a

reconguration of the post-operative female body in public space. Breast cancer

culture becom es a cruc ial site for the re-evaluation of wh at counts as a bea utiful

body, and w hat mean in g age, ra ce and cultural id en tity have in a cul ture where

disease and health technologies are reconstructing what a healthy body is, and

what particular body parts m ean.

A ctivist pho tography

Alisa Solomo ns imp or tant essay chronicling breast cancer activism , The politics

of breast cancer, appeared in the Village Voice in May 1991.3 Signicantly, the

article begins with an ironic anecdote about a post-op breast surgery patient

named Miriam w ho is visited by a R 2R volunteer a woman with big hair andnails and a body-hugg ing Lana Turn er-style sweater. To M iriams co nsternation,

the volunteers main a genda is the prosthetic recovery of M iriams breast that

is, her bodys public return to norm ative standards of female bodily form . Un til

the early 1990 s, the typical media image of a wom an w ith breast cancer was the

smiling, middle-aged white wom an, identied as a survivor a wom an whose

clothed body and perfectly symmetrical bustline belied the impact of breast

cancer. A 1995 episode of Chicago Ho pe typies this public fantasy of survival as



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physical restoration. The episode features a teenage girl. She is African-Am eri-

can and beautiful and, tragically, she has breast cancer. This perfect young bo dy

loses a breast to ma stectomy. H owever, by the end of the episode a skilful plastic

surgeon returns the g irls body to its near-perfect state. We are given a view o fthe young womans reconstructed body as her mother exclaims to the doctor:

How do you do w hat you do? Here the body of the wom an with breast cancer

is nally ma de public. H owever, the body which this episode m akes available for

public display is a black wom ans body, a m ove that replicates the medical tra-

dition o f using the bod ies of black wom en for teaching dem onstrations and text-

book ex am ples. The privac y of white women s experience with bre as t cancer is

thus maintained. M oreover, this episode culminates by displaying the body of the

woman with breast cancer at a moment when all signs of disease and its treat-ments are erased. Elided is not only the scar of the unreconstructed breast, but

the fact that the great ma jority of wome n w ith breast cancer are far from young.

Like many print advertisem ents prom oting mamm ograms, the Chicago Hope

episode m akes invisible the factors of age and associated issues of beauty that are

relevant to the majority of women w ith breast cancer, w hile including black

bodies only to replicate a ce nturies-old pro blem in Western m edical repre sen-

tation.

The repression of the im age of scar tissue, hair loss and ageing is not limitedto the popular media. Two years after the publication of Solom ons essay, her

title, The politics of breast cancer was given to a urry of feature articles pub-

lished in the scientic, liberal fem inist and m ainstream p resses. In 1993, Science

(Marshal et al., 1993) and Ms (Rennie et al., 1993) both published special sec-

tions with the same title. Interestingly, neither series features the fem ale body in

any sign icant w ay. Ms used a typeface graphic design on its cover and illustrated

the persona l vignettes that were scattered througho ut the essays w ith small, at-

tering portraits of sm iling survivors with sym metrical bustlines. Science optedfor wh at the editors described as a statistical por trait of breast cancer (a display

of graphs and charts) along with the great m en of science approach (the only

actual portraits in the piece were head shots of scientists credited with research

breakthro ughs) .

Surprisingly, it was the New York Times M agazines variation on So lomo ns title

theme that provided a radical twist on the mainstream tendency to disembody

breas t cance r. To illustrate T he an guished politic s of breast cancer by Susan

Ferraro, the cover story for 15 August 1993, the New York Times Magazine editors

chose for the c over a photog raph of a stylishly thin woma n wearing a high-fashion

wh ite sheath and headscarf, her dress cut low on the diagonal to reveal the

wom ans mastectomy scar (Figure 1). The prom inently placed publication of this

image, a self-portrait by the artist Matuschka titled Beauty out of damage ,

m arked a watershed in media representations of breast cancer. Matusch ka, an ex-

fashion model and p hotographer, not only exposes her scar to public view, but

artfully fram es and lights it for optim al display. A s she puts it, If I m going to



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Figure 1 q Matusc hka 1993 Beauty Out of Dam age


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both er putt ing anything on my chest, why not install a cam era? (M atus chka,

1992: 33). The scar occupies the space closest to the centre of the page, a locus

towards which the eye is drawn by angles cut by Matuschkas arm and the

shadows created by her prominent bone structure and the gowns neckline.M atuschkas head is in prole, turned away from the camera, as if to dramatize

the large caption that lls a por tion of the page to prono unce: You C an t Look

Away Anymore.

The publication of Beauty out of damage was a watershed in the public rep-

resentation of breast cancer becau se it rendered pu blic an im age previously famil-

iar only to medical students and doctors, and wom en and their caregivers, fam ilies

and close friends. The image stunned the New York Times public because it exposed

physical evidence of breast cancer surgery that previously had been subject torepression in the mainstream press, with its images of smiling survivors and

charts. It generated a vast outpouring of com men tary by readers both in suppor t

of and in opposition to the papers editorial decision to use this image on its maga -

zine cover. W hile som e readers saw in the photograph the message that wom en

who h ave undergone m astectomy are not victim s to be pitied and feared, and the

altered or m issing breast as som ething not to be prosthetically and journa listically

covered over and restored, others saw the image as an inappropriate display of

private parts and private matters. The issues that concern me m ost, though, arethe photographs representation of age, beauty and agency, and its apparent evo-

cation of the natural and the technological as they pertain to these issues.

Solomon, in her account of Miriam and the Reach to R ecovery volunteer,

suggests that the volunteer projects an outmoded politics of the body onto the

post-operative M iriam. She relates that Miriam is offended by the volunteers

assump tion that prosthetic simulation or restoration is the r st step to recovery.

Solomon seems to advocate, along w ith Lorde, a public body that bears its scar

as a natural and perhap s even healthy condition. This body is represented in aphotog raph used to illustrate her Village Voice essay of 1991, photographer Hella

Ham mids 1977 por trait of Deena M etzger, titled The w arrior .

Metzger was 41 years old when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in

1977. In a recent interview she recalls that after her mastectomy W hen I went

to a health club even a wom ens health club I noticed that I w as the only one

in the place with a mastectomy. I began to understand that women w ho had m as-

tectomies were not showing their bodies. A po et and novelist w ho had been red

from her tenured professorship for reciting a poem she had w ritten abou t censor-

ship (she eventually won an appeal in the Supreme Co urt), M etzger was n ot one

to comply with the times and hide her body. Instead, she adorned her scar with

a tattoo to better display it. If I were sitting in a sau na or I would b e swim ming

or something, because my chest was tattooed, it was implicit that someone could

look at my body, she explains. In this intimate setting, wom en would turn to

me and say, Thank you, and they felt relief. They saw having a ma stectomy was

not the en d of the w orld. 4



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W ishing to document the scar and tattoo, M etzger contacted Ham mid,

whose previous work included child photography shown in The Family of Man

exhibition curated by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in the

1950s. The warrior features the nude torso of Metzger, her white skin, natu-rally curly hair and exuberant expression framed against a backdrop of clouds.

H er arm s reach out in a gesture of openne ss to nature and the cosm os a gesture

that also expo ses fully her single breast and h er scar and tattoo, itself an image

evoking nature (a tree branch). Like the im age of M atuschka, this photograph

puts a positive and politicized spin on the scar and the on e-breasted fem ale body,

evoking Lordes fantasy of an army of one-breasted women confronting the

m edical establishment. But the two images differ in an important way: Metzgers

curly hair, unclothed torso and setting evoke an aesthetic of natural beauty andhealth. She is shot against the sky, as if eupho rically reaching to recovery w ithout

the aid of technology. As journalist Delaynie Rudner has rem arked, the image

draws you in with a touch of innocent hippie celebration (1995: 15). Rudner

describes Ham m ids photograph of M etzger as the perfect rst in the non-

m edical imaging of a mastectomy scar. W hether or not this is true, the image

certainly presented a stunning alternative to the ongoing medical tradition of

representing m astectomies, wherein womens faces are blacked out or their

heads cropped off to maintain anonym ity. The wa rrior sends a clear invitationto look and to acknow ledge that a mastectomy can be healthy and happy w ithout

being phy sical ly re store d .

M atuschkas self-por trait is a far cry from th is upbeat late 1970s dep iction o f

pleasure in the post-operative body in its natural state. M atuschka occupies a

stark environm ent suggesting both clinic and urban art studio sites where bodies

and body images are technologically transform ed. Like Metzger, she looks away

from the camera; however, her expression is serious if not severe. She is clothed

in a form -hugging sheath that suggests both a hospital gow n and formal eveningwear, a garment that suggests the bodys discipline and restriction w ithin the term s

of high fashion. Her headscarf, covering short dark hair, is reminiscent of the

turbans preferred by som e wom en to conc eal the fact of their hair loss as a result

of chemo therapy treatments. M atuschkas public im age of breast cancer clearly

advocates pushing the envelope of cultural expectations abou t the body within the

fashion industry: she looks forward to the day Vogue magazine would consider

devoting an entire issue to the dozens of beautiful one-breasted women who live

all over the world (Matuschka, 1992: 33). W hile Metzgers scar is displayed in a

manner that seem s to prom ote its joyous revelation, M atuschkas is artfully lit and

frame d to em phasize the role of concealment and d isplay in its disclosure. And

whereas The warrior puts forth the post-operative woman as a naturally beauti-

ful gure, Beauty out of dam age suggests a concept of beauty whose aesthetic

involves an appreciation of the fashioning of the body. Th e photograph seems to

suggest that far from destroying beauty, m astectomy can be appropriated for a

politicized display of high-tech beauty. In a new tw ist on techno -aesthetics, mas-



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tectomy joins the reper toire of body-altering surgical technique s that have gained

currency in 1 990s m ainstream fashion, techniques that include breast prosthetics,

implants and reconstruction; liposuction; face lifts; tummy tucks; eyelid recon-

struction, and body piercing. W hile som e of these techniques are associated withthe impetus to render the body closer to cultural nor ms, others appeal to cultural

constructions of the exotic or the unique.

W hile the a ssociation of on e-breastedness w ith d isease m akes it unlikely that

this condition will ever be incorporated into mainstream beauty culture,

M atuschkas photog raph goes a long way towards placing the fact and the look

of this bodily state into public consc io usness. I am not arguin g that M atusc hkas

self-portrait critiques the technological alteration of the body offered in pro-

cesses like breast reconstruction or the use of prostheses. Rather, my point is thatthis portrait foregrounds the scar as a physical and aesthetic transformation of

the body that is as signicant to the experience of breast cancer as these other

techniques and their mo re conventional (and familiar) results. In this image,

M atuschka has o pted to reclaim the scar as an object of aesthetic and political sig-

nicance and, more profoundly, as an object of fascination, if not beauty.

Despite its appearance in such a well-respected public site, Matusch ka and

her photograph,Beauty out of damage , were not emb raced by the breast cancer

community as universal signiers of the current state of breast cancer politics.The m agazine cover image w as nominated for a Pu litzer prize in 1994, but this

mo m ent did n ot necessarily mark a shift in the p ublic politics of breast cancer.

The photograph, like previous and subsequent work produced by Matuschka,

was not received with universal enthusiasm. That some readers were dismayed

by th is ed ito ria l deci sion is cle ar from so me of th e m any lett ers to th e ed itor

wh ich followed the storys publication. Indeed, author Susan Ferraro forewarn ed

readers of the controversial nature of M atuschkas work: Her po ster-size self-

portraits have shocked even some o f her mainstream sisters, she wr ites. This isnot surprising, since Matuschkas work circulated primarily in activist and art

venues such as demonstrations and exhibitions including the Womens Health

Show, a multi-site show m ounted in gallery spaces around N ew York C ity in the

winter of 1994.

De spite this public perception of M atuschka as too controversial or radical

a gure, her identity as an activist and m emb er of a health care counterculture

is far from secure. Or iginally a photographers mod el, M atuschkas transition

into breast cancer act iv ism was, in her own words, by chance. Although a

mem ber of the Wom ens Health Action M obilization (W HA M !), an activist

group close to ACT UP in its tactics and structure, M atuschkas relationship to

health activism seems to have been largely through the groups embrace of her

work. As she explained in an interview,

W HAM ! discovered me. I didnt even know what WH AM ! was. I was at a

talk-out on breast cancer in Washington, D.C., in front of the legislature



13/22

and various other politicians back in 1991. I was on chemotherapy. I was

wear ing a blonde wig, and I had already made a bunch of posters. . . . Evi-

dently, when I got up and spoke I moved a lot of the audience. There were

two or three WH AM ! mem bers there, and they had just started a breastcancer departm ent. They said that they would like to use one of my ima ges,

and asked me to come to one of their meetings. So I went to their m eet-

ings. Thats how it began.5

Conventions like the DC talk-out provided Matuschka with a venue to market

her photograph s in the for m o f postcards and posters. It was at the Breast C ancer

Coalition Convention in California in May of 1993 that Susan Ferraro encoun-

tered M atuschka by chance, displaying her posters on her ow n body, sandwich-board style (she had been barred from se llin g them). Andrew Moss , the ed ito r

of the New York Times Magazine, explained that Matuschka was called when the

ma gazine decided to run Ferraros story, whic h included m aterial on M atuschka,

at the eleventh hou r, and they had only a few days to locate a cover image.

According to M atuschka, the m agazine specied that they w anted an image with

a face but no breast. M osss accoun t suggests that the photo struck the editorial

team like a hamme r , leaving them unanimously com mitted to using it for the

cover.6

M atuschkas ambiguous status as, on the one hand, conventional m odel and

art photographer and, on the other, activist-by-default, allowed her to emerge as

a public icon of breast cancer activism in a m ainstream m edia venue like the New

York Times. Likewise, her ambiguous status as both youthful/beautiful and

damaged (to quo te the term she chose for her photographs title) allowed her

image to play a particular role for a particular set of readers. For the photograph

in question w as undoubtedly targeted to a very specic readership, those who

get the New York Times th ose wom en w hom Ferraro identies as the m ain streamsisters who might be offended by Matuschkas more daring work (Figure 2). Pre-

sumably these wom en m ight be willing to participate in activism in the form of

liberal political pressure groups and advocacy organizations FFANY, for

example. The Times tacitly marketed Matuschka the activist as an evocative but

acceptable symbol of w hite, urban, m iddle-class, professional womens breast

cancer activism . Ferraros article docum ents and constructs an activist counter-

sphere whose ties to nineteenth-century liberal counterspheres of women-only

voluntary associations are strikingly apparent, if not stated outright. Breastcancer, in this form ulation, is a disease with its ow n class aesthetic, culture and

constituency.

In sum, this image that apparently functioned as a mass public icon was in

fact identied w ith a relatively elite sector of wom en. The p ublic im age of breast

cancer which it puts forth tacitly incorporates whiteness, youth, thinness and

urban chic as core elements of the co llective body for which the activist fem in-

ist body collectively speaks. Yet very rarely d o we see p ublic representations of



14/22


Figure

2

q

Matuschka1994Which

SideDoYouWant?


15/22

older wom en (in their fties and sixties, say), w ho constitute the greater m ajority

of breast cancer cases in this country and who certainly comprise a large per-

centage of the New York Times Magazine readership. Photog raphs like the self-po r-

trait of artist Hannah W ilke and her mother, from a series produced between1978 and 19 81, are much less likely to circulate in public venues. This image

documents Wilkes mothers breast cancer. Wilke, like Matuschka, built her

career on self-portraits, m any of which featured her nude and youthful, slender

body. In th e ea rly 1990s, W ilke en ded her career with Intr a-Venous , a se ries of

nud e self-portraits of her own ageing and can cer-ridden body. N ot surprisingly,

this series, which d ocuments her treatm ent for lymphom a (the disease from

w hich she died in 1993 ), received far less attention than her earlier work.

These p oints about the factor of age in representations o f breast cance r leadme dangerously close to making an argument in favour of some sort of media

realism: breast cancer campaigns should depict older women and so forth. This

is hardly my goal. Rather, I am in favour of representations that take up the com -

plexities of age and beauty as they pertain to specic groups o f women for w hom

bre as t canc er is most imm ed iate ly a concer n (w omen in their fties an d six ties )

as well as those wom en c ategorically left out of discussions about breast cancer

med ia (for example, black wom en). It is worth recounting here a well-known

tenet of feminist lm theory: audience mem bers do not always or necessarilyrecognize themselves in images of their ow n kind that is, older women m ay

not necessarily identify any more with images of other older women than they

will with images of, say, younger wome n. (If this were not the case, M atuschkas

image would no t have received the broad-based response it got.) Perhaps the

inordinate num ber of representations of youthful, slender bodies in m ainstream

bre as t ca ncer m ed ia campaign s is not an error on th e part of m edia producers,

but an effecti ve use of the mechan ism s of id en ti cat ion and fantasy th at invite

viewers to look at and identify w ith particular bodily ideals and par ticular cul-tural nor ms, regardless of their own age and appearance.

To elaborate on this possibility, I will turn to a second m edia text, Ngozi

Onwurahs The Body Beautiful, a 1991 experim ental documentary lm about the

relationship between a young wom an a teenage bi-racial fashion m odel and

her m other, a w hite woman in her fties who is disabled by rheum atoid arthri-

tis and wh o bears the mem ories and the scars of breast cancer surgery. This

loosely autobiographical lm foregrounds the cultural aspects of breast cancer

that are repressed not on ly in the erasure of the post-operative body, but in the

elision of cultural difference am ong wom en imp acted by the disease.

The Bo dy Beautiful

In the U nited States, O nwurah has been represented as a black British lm-

maker, a docum entary lm-maker whose wo rk circulates in the womens lm



16/22

festival circuit. These designated categories of race, nationality and genre inform

the reception of her three best-known lms currently in circulation in this

country (Coffee-Colored Ch ildren, 19 88; The Body Beautiful, 1991, and Welcome to

the Terror Dome, 1994). However, what is less than clear from the promotion ofher work in the U S is that Onw urah is not only British but also N igerian. W hereas

in the U S she is m ost often identied as a black lm-m aker, in England she is

recognized (and identies herself) as mixed-race. H er lms are also difcult to

categorize within the limited terms of US lm criticism : they comb ine tech-

niques of conventional and experim ental docum entary and narrative, resisting

categorization within any o f the groups of black B ritish cinema familiar to U S

independent lm audiences.

By introducing O nw urah in this manner, I mean to highlight the fact that raceis as provisional and circum stantial a category as illness or disability. As The Body

Beautifulaptly dem onstrates, cultural identity and disability can also be intercon-

stitutive categories. W hile O nwu rah shares a history, a national identity and rep-

resentational politics w ith m any black British lm-m akers, her work is structured

through a discontinuity that also shapes cultural identity and representational

strategies in highly particular ways that is, in ways that, for Onw urah, have to

do not only with having been raised in N igeria and exiled to England at the age

of 9, but with her subsequent experience as an exoticized beauty, a professionalmo del whose com mo dity is her light-skinned body and her am biguously African-

Anglo features. Both The B ody Beautifuland O nwu rahs earlier lm Coffee-Colored

Children demonstrate that race is a historical category that can be structured

through experiences such as exile, loss of a father, a mothers disability, and a

general loss of the unity and stability of suc h basic categories as family and b ody.

Onwurahs identity is deeply informed by her status as the daughter of a white,

disabled and scarred m other a wo man w ith w hose body she strongly identies,

and a wom an w hose erotic and identicatory investment in the beauty, youth andcolour of her daughters body is also profoundly deep. The Body Beautiful is pri-

mar ily about M adge and N gozi Onw urahs relationship to public perceptions of

ageing, disguremen t and d isability. But, as in the print media b reast cancer cover-

age discussed above, questions of identity (nationality, race, class, sexuality and

gender) and related issues (health, beauty, ageing) are the fundam ental term s

through which this lm engages with public views about breast cancer.

In the central scene of the thirty-m inute lm , Ng ozi convinces her m other

to accom pany her to a sauna (coincidentally also the site of Metzgers enlighten-

m ent about the public repression of the scar). Inside the sauna, women lounge

bare to th e w ai st. M adge keeps her towel w ra ppe d up high, coverin g her

m astectomy scar. But she dozes off and the towel slips, exposing her scar. W hile

M adge sleeps, Ngo zi witnesses the stares of the wome n in the sauna as they look

and turn away from her m others scar. M adge wakes up, almost instantly feeling

for her towel and pulling it up over her chest, looking around in sham e to see if

anyone has noticed.



17/22

This scene performs a function not unlike that of Matuschkas photograph:

the taboo mastectomy scar is placed on display, shocking a public audience, w hile

the perform er of this scene averts her gaze from the eyes of the viewer. But there

are crucial differences between these texts. W hereas Matuschkas youthful andfashionably thin body is framed by a high-fashion sheath, M adges plump, ageing

torso is haphazardly draped with a towel. M oreover, while Matuschka clearly

poses for her photograph, we gaze on M adge while she sleeps, ostensibly unaware

of her position as spectacle. And wh ile Matusch ka as photograph er actively prof-

fers her body as both icon and m odel of wh at breast cancer can m ean (albeit for

women of a particular age, culture and class), Madge (who, signicantly, plays

herself in the lm ) perform s at the direction of her daughter, w ho is behind the

camera (and is played by an actor). If M atuschkas im age is a performance ofdeant pride and an assertion of the agency of the woman with breast cancer,

M adges is a staging of public embar rassment for the benet of N gozis (and the

viewers) enlightenm ent. Ngozi (we) learns com passion and awareness of the

me aning of Madges difference through Mad ges hum iliation.

M atuschkas distinction, due in part to her status as media icon, buffers her

availability as an identicatory gure for wom en viewers. H er function as a highly

symb olic image p recludes the shock of recognition available in the representation

of Madge. In the scene in which M adges body is exposed to the gaze of otherwomen , the camera provides us w ith subjective shots taken from the point of

view of the various wome n in the sauna, intercut with shots of these wom en from

N gozis line of sight. The organization of shots invites the viewer to see M adge

through the eyes of her daughter. We see Ma dge being seen by those wom en wh o

clearly are made unco m fortable at the sight of Madge s body. It might be argued

that Madges body represents not only the unimag inable, unim age-able fear that

any wom an m ight one day be disgured by breast cancer, but that age itself

inevitably w ill generate bodily ch anges (sagging, weight gain, loss of muscle tone) aspec ts of female bodily transformation held in gen er al publ ic contem pt an d

denial. In a sense, the missing breast is just one signier of Ma dges bodily ageing;

but th e scene al so represents Ngozi s shif t from a st ro ng iden ticat ion with the

body of th e m other to her ability to se e th at body from a dista nced, public eye.

By shifting the emphasis from the scarred body as iconic (as in the case of

M atuschkas photog raph) to that body as a lo cus in the shifting politics of looking,

The Body Beautiful is able to d irect its viewers to wo rk self-consciously through

com plex respon ses like recognition, identication and denial of bodily signs of

disease and ageing.

The them e of the negotiation of the public eye and the iconic status of the

marked body carries over from Onwurahs earlier lm, Coffee-Colored Children,

an experim ental docum entary devoted to recoun ting mixed-race Ngozi and her

bro th er Sim ons exper ien ce of grow in g up in Brita in . In Coffee-Colored Ch ildren,

we see the siblings as children being taunted with racial slurs, attempting to wash

off their skin colour, and eventually coming to term s with the com plex public



18/22

me anings of their bodies. The Body Beautiful, then, functions, like the earlier lm,

as a means of coming to terms w ith the body of the mother as a white body, but

as a body that is also ma rked by a com plex of other cultural identities and con -

ditions. This is not to say that physical disability and racial identity are alike, butthat disability is a process im plicated in the con struction o f cultural identity along

with race, class and gender; and that historically there has been continual slip-

page between the classication and ranking of bodies according to racial typolo-

gies and according to categories of health, disability and illness.

I want to consider this point more fully through one of the more contro-

versial scenes in The Body Beautiful: a fantasy/memory scene featuring Madge.

Leaving the sauna, M adge and N gozi stop for a cup of tea. M adge spies a young

black man playin g po ol and ex chan g in g sexis t ban te r w ith his fr ien ds, a co nver-sation in w hich a wom ans breasts are referred to as fried eggs . As M adge looks

on, the man catches Ngozis disapproving narrowing of the eyes, and he returns

her look w ith interest. This exchange of looks promp ts Madge to recall a

me mo ry of her N igerian husband. Mad ge states in voice-over, I saw the look in

his eyes and rem em bered it from so mew here in the past. A single caress from

him would sm ooth out the deform ities, give me the right to be d esired for my

bod y and not in sp ite of i t. The sh ots th at fo llow dem onstrate th e stre ngth of the

identicatory bon d that exists between m other and daughter on the b asis of oneanothers bodies. As M adge and the young m an make love, the sound-track gives

us Madges subjective memories of the young Ngozi and her brother arguing.

Intercut with this scene are shots of N gozi the mod el, her lips and breasts being

made up for a photo shoot, and M adge looking on and directing the love scene

from an am biguously situated off-screen space. Just as the mo ther lives through

her daughters public body, as if it were a prosthetic extension of the sexuality

and youth she feels she has lost, so Ngo zi ima gines herself in control of the

enlivening of her m others sexual desires. Above all, Ngozi wants to return toher mother the sexual life she feels she has lost with the loss of her breast and

(subsequently) her youth. However, rather than visually restoring her mo thers

body to som e pr ior state of co m plet ion fo r th e purpose of th e fantasy, N gozi

dem ands that the scar itself must be rend ered a site of sexual p leasure for both

her mother and the young m an. The shots of love-making between M adge and

the young man are intercut with shots of Ngozi being made up and shot by a

fashion photographer who commands,pump it up, give me some passion . Like

the photographer who directs her performance from off-screen space, the char-

acter Ngozi directs her mo thers love-m aking scene from ex tradiegetic space. As

the young man m oves down M adges torso w ith caresses and kisses, he hesitates

at the scar. Touch it , Ngo zi com mands from her directorial position in off-

screen space, touch it, you bastard .

Without question, The Body Beautifulis about co nstructing a public image of

bre ast can cer th at goes beyond gen era lize d notions of illness , disab ility an d cul-

tural identity. As On wu rah explains,



19/22

It w asnt simply just a mo therdaugh ter thing. [The lm] had all of the

obvious stuff about the body and beauty, but it had quite a lot about race

in it, too, almost by accident things that I hadnt really thought about.

For exam ple, her fantasy sequence would need to be w ith a black m an, andI wanted to try to get out of that. This sequence involved blackwhite,

youngold, disablednondisabled. Just for this fantasy sequence, the lm

was going to take on all of these m issions. At one po int I was going to try

to have a white guy in there, but m om was really insistent that her fantasies

werent just abstract fantasies. They were fantasies to do w ith her, and she

wanted this black guy.7

The Body Beautifuldem onstrates that public discourse o n disability is alw ays abou tissues such as desire and pleasure, race and age. But how does this lm function

w ithin public cultures of health specically? W ho is the audience for this lm ? In

the US, The Body Beautifulcirculates through indepen dent lm venues. It has been

show n at womens and experimental lm festivals, academ ic conferences, and in

university lm an d wom ens studies classroom s. In the United States, it is not a

movement lm in the sense that it is not often screened among g roups form ed

on the basis of health issues. However, the lm has a very different set of venues

in Britain. On wu rah explains:

In England, we have something called the W I [Womens Institute]. It s the

kind of organization that Miss M arple wou ld have belonged to in the ru ral

areas. They have the largest women s health support network in the U.K.

Their groups have actually used The Body Beautiful . And theyre the m ost

right-wing, the m ost conservative, that you can get. But I think that here

[in the U S] you actually have m ore restrictions or self-censorship on things

to do with nudity, sex, or violence. I m just beginning to realize this.

A nd

The Body Beautifulwasnt m eant to be an educational lm. It isnt a lm for

wom en w ho have just learned that they have breast cancer. You have to be

a little bit down the journey to see the lm. But still, its used widely. Qu ite

often my mom goes out with it, and its a comp letely different experience

then. Its still m ainly a lmm akers lm, a womens festival lm. Its just tooblu nt. If som eo ne diagnosed m e with breas t ca ncer and I saw the lm the

next day I think Id go out and kill myself the d ay after, its so c onfron-

tational.8

The co ntradictions here are striking. In England the lm is used in the m ost con-

servative sector of wom ens advocacy grou ps, yet it is too con frontational for

even its own p roducer to to lerate if she were to w atch it as a wom an w ith breast



20/22

cancer. H ere we see the same co ntradictions evident in the appropriation of acti-

vist Matuschkas demonstration posters for the New York Times Magazine story.

This suggests that perhaps in England as in the US we are seeing a blurring of

boundar ie s betw een in sti tu tion al health cultures and cou nte rcultures, andbetween mainstre am and alternat ive med ia ve nue s and audiences. O nw urah

herself emphasizes the importance of recognizing local conditions of use and

context:

In Britain there is a burgeoning disabilities movement, and I den itely saw

[the lm ] in the context of that. It had a place within the issues surround -

ing the rights and disabilities m ovem ents. Ive gotten involved because my

mo thers always been disabled and my gran dm other was deaf since the ageof two, so we used to sign with her.9

Earlier I posed the questions: W hat are the implications of this idea of the obso-

lescence of boun ded com mun ity and locality when w e consider collective iden-

tity as it form s, provisionally, on the basis of illness, disability, and the ght for

access to treatment? Do reterritorialized space and transcultural for mations

becom e metaphors, or is th ere a paral le l re co ngura tion and dispersa l of col-

lective identity in the postm odern experience of breast cancer? The Body Beauti-fu l speaks to these questions insofar as it addresses viewers across the bounded

com mun ities of health educators, the British and Am erican independent lm

com mun ities and disabilities movem ents, while also addressing issues of iden-

tity and its relationship to race, age, illness and disability. But while the lm

addresses with great com plexity the specic cultural issues framing exper iences

of breast cancer, it none the less fails to generate a sense of comm unity among

its diverse audiences. M ost imm ediately, the lm s display of an intergenera-

tional and interracial sexual fantasy and a physically close mixed-racemotherdaughter relationship place its message beyond the interests of many

m ainstream viewers. O nw urahs own adm ission that she would not wan t to see

the lm if she herself were facing breast cancer has been ec hoed by n ume rous

women who have been in audiences where I showed the lm and spoke about

it. These points leave me facing a troubling contradiction: How are these issues

to be raised and worked through, if not by wom en to whom they are of the m ost

concern? Would it be better to bracket differentials of class, cultural identity,

ethnicity and sexuality in order to under score the shared experienc es of disease?

Are the effective media texts those that provide easy answers (for example,

prosthetic recovery) and false closure (a return to som e ideal of a norm al life)?

I would argue that work l ike Matuschkas and Onw urahs, difcult as it may

be, perfor ms th e cruci al task of w iden ing the pool o f collective images , ex pand-

ing the possibilities of what can be seen beyond outmod ed norm s and altering

historical concepts of the body beautiful to incorporate the effects of breast

cancers limited treatment options.



21/22

Notes

1 S ee, fo r e xa mple, H a mid N a cys stu dy o f th e Ira nia n ex ilic co mmu nity in

southern C alifornia that both produces and views Persian-language program -m ing narrowcast cable shows that m ore often than not em brace family values

and political views which would be regarded as conservative within Euro-

Am erican cultural standards (Nacy, 1993).

2 For a brie f d iscus sion o f R2R and simila r g roups see Batt (1994: 22137).

3 Th is essay, t it led The po litic s o f b reas t cancer , was republ ished in Camera

Obscura, 28 (1992).

4 Q u oted in R udn er (19 95 : 1 4 15 ). I am in deb te d to R udn ers es say fo r th e

information regarding the Ham mid/M etzger photograph. He notes that the

photograph was originally the inspiration for a book of poetry by Metzger

titled Tree. W hen the publisher refused to use the im age for the books cover,

Metzger used it to accompany a poem she wrote for a poster that became a

cult item in fem inist circles around the country. In 1992, in the third of its

four p rintings, Tree was nally published with The wom an war rior on its cover

(by Wingbow Press). H amm id died the sam e year of breast cancer (Rudner,

1995: 1516).

5 F ro m an un pu blish ed in ter v ie w w ith M a tu schk a by th e au th or.

6 M o ss and M atu sc hka are qu ote d in Ru dn er (19 95 : 2 46 ).7 In Cartw right, 1994.

8 In Cartw right, 1994.

9 In Cartw right, 1994.

References

Batt, Sharon (1994) Patient No M ore: The Politics of Breast Cancer, Charlottetown,

Canada: Gynergy Books.

Belkin, Lisa (1996) How breast cancer becam e this years hot charity , New York Times

Magazine, 2 2 D e cemb er: 4 06, 5 2, 5 56.

The Body Beautiful (1991) Director Ngozi Onw urah. Distributed by Wom en Make

M ovies, N ew York City.

Cartwright, Lisa (1994) Interview w ith Matuschka. Unpublished.

Coffee-Colored Children (1988) Director Ngozi Onw urah. Distributed by Women

M ake Movies, N ew York City.

Ferguson, James and Gupta, Akhil (1992) Beyond culture: space, identity, and thepolitics of difference , Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1 ): 6 2 3.

Fusco, Co co (1988) Fantasies of oppositionality: reections on recent conferences

in New York and Boston , Screen, 29(4): 8093.

Lorde, Audre (1980) The Cancer Journals, San Francisco: Spinsters Ink.

Marshal, Eliot (1993) The politics of breast cancer, Science, 259, 22 January.

Matuschka (1992) The body posit ive: got to get this off my c hest , On the Issues,

winter: 307.



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Nacy, Hamid (1993) The M aking of Exile Cultures, Minneapoli s and London: Uni-

versity of M innesota Press.

Rennie, Susan, National Black Womens Health N etwork, Liane C larfene-Casten and

Carolyn Faulder (1993) The politics of breast cancer , Ms, 3 (6 ): 37 6 9.Rudner, Delaynie (1995) The censored scar , Gauntlet, 9: 13 2 7.

Solomon, Alisa (1992) The polit ics of breast cancer , Camera Obscura, 2 8: 1 57 7 7.

Also published in Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright and Constance Penley

(eds) (1998) The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science, and Gender, New

Yo rk : N Y U Press.

Taylor, Janelle S. (1994) Consuming c ancer charity, Z Magazine, 7 (2 ): 3 03.


Documents

Cartwright Breast