Malignant. S. Lochlann Jain

and with condescension, as one of life’s losers.”³ Not only does a cancer diagnosis tend to relegate one to the world of loserdom, but breast cancer in particular drags one by the hair into the territory of gender. When diagnosed with breast cancer, the literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick thought, “Shit, now I guess I really must be a woman.”⁴

      Moving between self-elegy and elegy of her friend Michael Lynch, a gay man living with HIV/AIDS, Sedgwick examines diagnosis and gender in her article “White Glasses.” She details her cross-country search for a pair of spectacles. She wanted those very glasses that Michael wore as a flaming signifier, to augment her own self-identification as a gay man. But on finally finding them, she realized with dismay that on a woman “the pastel sinks . . . invisibly into the camouflage of femininity.”⁵ In the end, the glasses merely reinforced the very codes of femininity that Sedgwick aimed to shuck. In a similar way, breast cancer—not the breast itself—sinks her further into the obscurity of white womanhood.

      You can spend your whole life creating an identity different from the one people smear onto you (girl, husband-seeker, spinster, mother, whatever), and then one charming little diagnosis threatens to suck you under, into the archetypal death doled out by the feminine body. Like a huge “we told you so,” diagnosis provides the capstone to the argument that biology defines you. “They” (whoever they are), with hurtling finality, shamed me into accepting the truth of my sex.

      Then again, gender signifiers provide an easier conversation topic than does mortality. “Shit, I am woman (fine, have it your way)” is more palatable than “I’m also person—animal, mortal, finite.” What would it mean to acknowledge—really acknowledge—the sheer number of people who literally rot from the inside out each year, with no way to stop it, while so many known causes of cancer continue to be pumped into the environment? Just like Sedgwick’s white glasses, which sank “banally and invisibly into the camouflage of femininity on a woman,” cancer everywhereness drops into a sludge of nowhereness. The focus on pink and breasts and comfort conveniently displaces sheer terror, as do the ubiquitous warning signs. While the gay activist slogan silence = death decreed public outcry, for cancer, ubiquity = death. Now, that’s terrifying.

      BOMBSHELL

      In The Cancer Journals, feminist Audre Lorde compiled journal entries, poetry, and analysis to explore her experience of breast cancer in the 1970s. The book brought cancer out of two closets: the personal closet of disguise and the political closet of cancer production. Lorde believed that the pressure toward prostheses and reconstructions tended, on the one hand, to prevent women from coming to terms with the multiple losses that accompany the disease and, on the other, to make women feel the lack of a breast as a stigma: a sign of shame, a token of lost sexuality, and therefore an indicator of cultural worthlessness.

      In considering mastectomy as a gendered stigma, Lorde poses the counterexample of the Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, who wore an eye patch to cover an injury sustained in World War II. To Lorde, the patch was an insignia of Dayan’s suffering and thus his strength and courage: “The world sees him as a warrior with an honorable wound, and a loss of a piece of himself which he has marked, and mourned, and moved beyond. And if you have trouble dealing with Moshe Dayan’s empty eye socket, everyone recognizes that it is your problem to solve, not his. Well, women with breast cancer are warriors, also.”⁶

      For Lorde, the signifier of the scar presented opportunities for communicative and collective action. The Cancer Journals—a critical part of both the history of cancer and the history of feminism—offers an exhilarating read. Lorde called it as she saw it, unapologetically. When offered a prosthesis to stuff into her bra, she responds, “For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim.”⁷