1 - Re-Covering Scarred Bodies: Reading Photography

Summary

Confirming that it is much more than a surgical sign, the site of the amputated breast has generated vibrant conversations taking place through breast cancer autobiography and art photography, in academic and activist circles, as well as in the countless stories of ordinary women. These are conversations that open up and destabilise medical understandings of the body and of breast cancer by articulating connections between lived experience, history and feminist politics, and by engaging with artistic and theoretical discourses on the body, which in turn impact the arts and narratives about women's health. In The Cancer Journals, a key point of reference for health feminism and studies on breast cancer narratives since its publication in 1980, African American writer and activist Audre Lorde writes about her refusal to follow the path of prosthesis or, as she calls it, the path of ‘silence and invisibility’ (1996: 4). Twenty-two years later, American feminist critic Diane Price Herndl, who also underwent a mastectomy, justifies in an article why she did not have ‘to wear breast cancer in the same way [as Lorde]’ (2002: 150). With this critical dialogue, the chapter juxtaposes visual representations of breast cancer experiences by two British artists who are also speaking from different historical moments: Jo Spence (1934–92), a photographer who has had a huge impact on generations of photographers (especially in Britain), and Sam Taylor-Wood, a photographer and visual artist (born in 1967) who is at the forefront of a new generation of contemporary British artists. In particular, I analyse photographs from Spence's touring exhibition The Picture of Health? (1985) and Taylor-Wood's Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare (2001).

The debate between Lorde and Herndl, around which my argument unfolds, has a more specific focus, dealing with understandings of prosthetics and breast reconstruction as techniques of ‘disciplinary normalization’ (Foucault 1995: 296) of the female body. However, it raises broader questions concerning issues of concealment and visibility of the body, more specifically with reference to the site of the post-operative breast, and meditates on various versions of feminist politics that different responses to the disabled body invoke. Spence and Taylor-Wood initially seem to have very few things in common.