the cancer journals audre lorde sparknotes

Lorde uses the ailing body’s specific capacities, knowledge, needs, and energies, both creative and erotic, as modes of interrupting and restructuring the values and beliefs that constitute ‘normalcy.’ She shows how the construction of everyday, routine normality involves, among other forms of violence, the normalization of the repression or demonization of the sick or disabled body. Writing becomes a space and gesture of reclamation that allows Lorde to reinscribe her diseased, mutilated, and non-normative body within the field of narratively constructed truth and visibility.

The transmutation of lived experience into language through the journals that Lorde maintained during her convalescence is not only an archival self-assertion against the gendered forces of amnesia, misappropriation, and erasure. In the wake of her mastectomy, cancer became for Lorde a fertile site for mounting a powerful critique of the societal norms – reproduced by various media representations and medico-scientific discourses – that coerce women’s bodies into models benefitting capitalist structures and their consumerist agendas of reducing precarious lives and complex suffering to economies of profit maximization. With her diagnosis, Lorde was confronted with an altered existential terrain in which the physical and emotional vicissitudes brought about by cancer were coupled with a devastating post-operative experience of dehumanization, prejudice, and potential invisibilisation, often by the medical establishment itself. She had been active within civil rights movements and intellectual circles that included her partner Frances Clayton, Adrienne Rich, Maureen Brady, and Judith McDaniel among others staunchly advocating against systemic racism and the heteropatriarchal oppression of social and sexual minorities.

At the time of her diagnosis in 1978, Lorde was an established poet, a Black feminist writer and teacher. At the age of 44, Audre Lorde was diagnosed with a malignant tumour in her right breast and presented with a choice between an aggressive treatment and the surgical removal of her cancerous breast.

The cancer journals audre lorde sparknotes