Books on Cancer
The Undying by
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION "The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." --Sally Rooney, author of Normal People "Anne Boyer's radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." --Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain "dolorists," the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of "pink ribbon culture" while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious. Includes black-and-white illustrations
ISBN: 9781250757982Publication Date: 2020-09-08
The Cancer Journals by
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.
ISBN: 9780143135203Publication Date: 2020-10-13
Theatre and Cancer by
This incisive and thoughtful new title in the Theatre And series confronts the difficult relationship between theatre and cancer. It explores representations of cancer in fictional worlds and autobiographical performances while also highlighting work that reimagines and reinvigorates the genre of 'Cancer Performance'. Challenging conventional narratives which rely on the binary of tragedy versus survival, Brian Lobel argues for an alternative approach to understanding cancer in relation to theatre. Concise yet thought-provoking, this book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre, performance and disability studies.
ISBN: 9781352006469Publication Date: 2019-06-17
All In by
All In is a queer feminist memoir of cancer and what it means to survive. After years of experiencing painful periods that she was led to believe were normal, Caitlin Breedlove was diagnosed with ovarian cancer--the deadliest of all gynecological cancers, which disproportionately impacts queer women, trans men, Jewish women of Eastern European descent, and older women. As she writes, "It feeds on those who can't go to a doctor and those who convince ourselves we do not need to." Thrust into a series of major surgeries amid the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Breedlove lingered at the edges of the living and made a deal with her ancestors: if she lived, she would write for them and all the suffering in her lineage that had gone unnamed. With the generous and community-minded heart of an organizer, Breedlove chronicles harms caused by our profit-driven health care system, and explores the rigors of single parenting while living with chronic illness; the medical neglect that women, the LGBTQ+ community, and others on the margins experience; and her challenges with addiction. And, like Audre Lorde and Barbara Ehrenreich, she calls out the insidious impact of "toxic positivity" on women who live with cancer. The result is an intensely powerful narrative about the connective potential of grief and forging a new life.
ISBN: 9781849355308Publication Date: 2024-01-16
A Darker Ribbon by
A Twentieth-Century Story of Breast Cancer, Women, and Their Doctors In the first cultural history of breast cancer, Ellen Leopold asks how sexual politics have shaped the relationship between patient and physician, and how a disease recently shrouded in secrecy has become so public.
ISBN: 9780807065129Publication Date: 1999-10-25
Pink Ribbon Blues by
Pink ribbon paraphernalia saturate shopping malls, billboards, magazines, television, and other venues, all in the name of breast cancer awareness. In this compelling and provocative work, Gayle Sulik shows that though this "pink ribbon culture" has brought breast cancer advocacy much attention, it has not had the desired effect of improving women's health. It may, in fact, have done the opposite. Based on eight years of research, analysis of advertisements and breast cancer awareness campaigns, and hundreds of interviews with those affected by the disease, Pink Ribbon Blues highlights the hidden costs of the pink ribbon as an industry, one in which breast cancer has become merely a brand name with a pink logo. Indeed, while survivors and supporters walk, run, and purchase ribbons for a cure, cancer rates rise, the cancer industry thrives, corporations claim responsible citizenship while profiting from the disease, and breast cancer is stigmatized anew for those who reject the pink ribbon model. But Sulik also outlines alternative organizations that make a real difference, highlights what they do differently, and presents a new agenda for the future.
ISBN: 9780199749935
Mammographies by
While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer's book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction. Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer's methodology--best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary--includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.
ISBN: 9780472029235Publication Date: 2013-06-10
The Scar of Visibility by
Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging--and the bodily access they imply--to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another's bodily experience and the effects--physical, emotional, and social--of medical procedures.In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and "knowledge projects" surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O'Reilly; films like David Cronenberg's Crash and Marina de Van's In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramírez.At the heart of this work is the scar--a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture.Petra Kuppers is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge.
ISBN: 9780816646531Publication Date: 2007-01-16
Community Performance by
Community Performance: An Introduction is a comprehensive and accessible practice-based primer for students and practitioners of community arts, dance and theatre. It is both a classroom-friendly textbook and a handbook for the practitioner, perfectly answering the needs of a field where teaching is orientated around practice. Offering a toolkit for students interested in running community arts groups, this book includes: international case-studies and first person stories by practitioners and participants sample exercises, both practical and reflective study questions excerpts of illustrative material from theorists and practitioners. This book can be used as a standalone text or together with its companion volume, The Community Performance Reader, to provide an excellent introduction to the field of community arts practice. Petra Kuppers has drawn on her vast personal experience and a wealth of inspiring case studies to create a book that will engage and help to develop the reflective community arts practitioner.
ISBN: 9780203964002Publication Date: 2007-03-12
Disability Culture and Community Performance by
Performances in hospices andon beaches; cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the US; communal poetry among mental health system survivors: this book presents a senior practitioner/critic's exploration of arts-based research processes sustained over more than a decade -a subtle engagement with disability culture."
ISBN: 1283210207Publication Date: 2011-08-24
Silent Spring by
Silent Spring is Rachel Carson's bestselling, scientifically passionate exposure of the effects of the indiscriminate use of chemicals. She describes how pesticides are applied to farms, forests and gardens, with scant regard to the consequences. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0141994002Publication Date: 2020
Malignant by
Nearly half of all Americans will be diagnosed with an invasive cancer--an all-too ordinary aspect of daily life. Through a powerful combination of cultural analysis and memoir, this stunningly original book explores why cancer remains so confounding, despite the billions of dollars spent in the search for a cure. Amidst furious debates over its causes and treatments, scientists generate reams of data--information that ultimately obscures as much as it clarifies. Award-winning anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain deftly unscrambles the high stakes of the resulting confusion. Expertly reading across a range of material that includes history, oncology, law, economics, and literature, Jain explains how a national culture that simultaneously aims to deny, profit from, and cure cancer entraps us in a state of paradox--one that makes the world of cancer virtually impossible to navigate for doctors, patients, caretakers, and policy makers alike. This chronicle, burning with urgency and substance leavened with brio and wit, offers a lucid guide to understanding and navigating the quicksand of uncertainty at the heart of cancer. Malignant vitally shifts the terms of an epic battle we have been losing for decades: the war on cancer.
ISBN: 0520276574Publication Date: 2013-10-15
Pink Ribbons, Inc by
"Samantha King explains how, beyond being an all-too-frequent and still-too-lethal disease for many women, breast cancer is a corporate dream come true." --Herizons "Fascinating. King's deft and thoughtful interpretation of the pink ribbon phenomenon is an important wake-up call. Going against the grain, she takes a clear-eyed look at a trend that often seems to outshine the disease that put it on the map." --Women's Review of Books "King's criticisms of breast-cancer philanthropy provide a new means of looking at one of our culture's most celebrated causes. For anyone who has ever squirreled away yogurt lids for the cause, Pink Ribbons, Inc. is food for thought." --Bitch "A fascinating read for anyone whose life has been touched by breast cancer." --Curve "Breast cancer advocacy is being transformed from meaningful civic participation into purchasing products. To understand the personal, social, and political costs, read this book." --Barbara Brenner, Executive Director of Breast Cancer Action In Pink Ribbons, Inc., Samantha King traces how breast cancer has been transformed from a stigmatized disease and individual tragedy to a market-driven industry of survivorship. Here, for the first time, King questions the effectiveness and legitimacy of privately funded efforts to stop the epidemic among American women. Highly revelatory-at times shocking-Pink Ribbons, Inc. challenges the commercialization of the breast cancer movement. Samantha King is associate professor of physical and health education and women's studies at Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario
ISBN: 9780816648993Publication Date: 2008-05-19
Illness As Metaphor by
Examines the fantasies, metaphors, and imagery connected with cancer, tuberculosis, and other types of illnesses.
ISBN: 9780374174439Publication Date: 1978-01-01
Books on Performance, Justice, and Disability
Disability Visibility by
"Disability rights activist Alice Wong brings tough conversations to the forefront of society with this anthology. It sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities, as told by none other than authors with these life experiences. It's an eye-opening collection that readers will revisit time and time again."-Chicago Tribune One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent-but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people,just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, From Harriet McBryde Johnson's account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond- this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
ISBN: 9781984899422Publication Date: 2020-06-30
Feminist, Queer, Crip by
In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.
ISBN: 9780253009227Publication Date: 2013-05-16
Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century by
This volume analyzes representations of disability in art from antiquity to the twenty-first century, incorporating disability studies scholarship and art historical research and methodology. This book brings these two strands together to provide a comprehensive overview of the intersections between these two disciplines. Divided into four parts: Ancient History through the 17th Century: Gods, Dwarfs, and Warriors 17th-Century Spain to the American Civil War: Misfits, Wounded Bodies, and Medical Specimens Modernism, Metaphor and Corporeality Contemporary Art: Crips, Care, and Portraiture and comprised of 16 chapters focusing on Greek sculpture, ancient Chinese art, Early Italian Renaissance art, the Spanish Golden Age, nineteenth century art in France (Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec) and the US, and contemporary works, it contextualizes understandings of disability historically, as well as in terms of medicine, literature, and visual culture. This book is required reading for scholars and students of disability studies, art history, sociology, medical humanities and media arts.
ISBN: 9780367500474Publication Date: 2021-08-01
Healing Justice Lineages by
A profound offering and call to action-collective stories, testimonials, and incantations for renewing political and spiritual liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer and Trans healing justice lineages We reclaim the power, resilience, and innovation of our ancestors through this book. To embody their wisdom across centuries and generations is to continue their legacy of liberation and healing. In this anthology, Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice-a political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression. They call forth the ancestral medicines and healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next. Anti-capitalist, Black feminist, and abolitionist, Healing Justice Lineages is a profound and urgent call to embrace community and survivor-led care strategies as models that push beyond commodified self-care, the policing of the medical industrial complex, and the surveillance of the public health system. Centering disability, reproductive, environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, this collection elevates and archives an ongoing tradition of liberation and survival-one that has been largely left out of our history books, but continues to this day. In the first section, "Past- Reckoning with Roots and Lineage," Page and Woodland remember and reclaim generations-long healing justice and community care work, asking critical questions like- How did our ancestors transform trauma and violence in their liberation work? What were our ancestors reckoning with-and what did they imagine? The next sections, "Origins of Healing Justice" and "Alchemy- Theory + Praxis," explore regional stories of healing justice in response to the current political and cultural landscape. The last section, "Political + Spiritual Imperatives for the Future," imagines a future rooted in lessons of the past; addresses the ways healing justice is being co-opted and commodified; and uplifts emergent work that's building infrastructure for care, safety, healing, and political liberation.
ISBN: 9781623177140Publication Date: 2023-02-07
Brilliant Imperfection by
Drawing on memoir, history, and theory, Eli Clare complicates the understanding of cure, seeing it as an ideology that serves contradictory purposes--from saving lives to social control--while critiquing cure rhetoric and the drive to cure disabled people through an insistence of the value of disability.
ISBN: 9780822373520Publication Date: 2017-01-06
Care Work by
"Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha is a poet and essayist whose most recent book, the memoir Dirty River, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. She is also a long-time member of the disability justice movement, which advocates for the rights of the disabled. In her latest book of essays, Leah writes passionately and personally about disability justice, on subject such as the creation of care webs, collective access, and radically accessible spaces. She also imparts her own survivor skills and wisdom based on her years of activist work, empowering the disabled--in particular, those in queer and/or BIPOC communities--and granting them the necessary tools by which they can imagine a future where no one is left behind. Presently, disability justice and emotional/care work are buzzwords on many people's lips, and the disabled and sick are discovering new ways to build power within themselves and each other; at the same time, those powers remain at risk in this fragile political climate in which we find ourselves. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms. "-- In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms. Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 9781551527390Publication Date: 2018-10-01
The Disability Studies Reader by
The Fourth Edition of the Disability Studies Readerbreaks new ground by emphasizing the global, transgender, homonational, and posthuman conceptions of disability. Including physical disabilities, but exploring issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities, this edition explores more varieties of bodily and mental experience. New histories of the legal, social, and cultural give a broader picture of disability than ever before. Now available for the first time in eBook format 978-0-203-07788-7.
ISBN: 9780415630528Publication Date: 2013-02-08
Studying Disability Arts and Culture by
In this accessible introduction to the study of Disability Arts and Culture, Petra Kuppers foregrounds themes, artists and theoretical concepts in this diverse field. Complete with case studies, exercises and questions for further study, the book introduces students to the work of disabled artists and their allies, and explores artful responses to living with physical, cognitive, emotional or sensory difference. Engaging readers as cultural producers, Kuppers provides useful frameworks for critical analysis and encourages students to explore their own positioning within the frames of gender, race, sexuality, class and disability. Comprehensive and accessible, this is an essential handbook for undergraduate students or anyone interested in disabled bodies and minds in theatre, performance, creative writing, art and dance.
ISBN: 9781137413468Publication Date: 2014-10-24
