armin's Reviews > The Cancer Journals

Very brief but unbelievably profound and holistic! It is jarring to see a cancer patient being so much in control of her critical faculty to be able to make so much sense of the disease that is pushing her towards her end.
Audre Lorde offers profound insights into the imagery around breast cancer, how women's coping with it is conditioned and informed by the [necessarily heteronormative] patriarchal order, and how the center of a breast cancer patient is the gaze that she has to pander to, mostly [but not only] through prosthesis.
She also does a brilliant job in portraying the lesbian community, its recently obtained visibility in the aftermath of Stonewall, and its healing role in helping her cope with the consequences of mastectomy.
Another thing she takes a stab at is the medical industry, Cancer Inc., as she calls it and the profit that is made through cancer, in the 1970s, so do your math now!
Can't recommend this enough and I am definitely going back to it again and again.