Work · African & Africana Philosophy
The Cancer Journals
Diary entries and essays on breast cancer and mastectomy: on fear, silence and the refusal to hide a changed body behind a prosthesis.
Introduction
Lorde published this short book in 1980 with the small feminist press Spinsters Ink, two years after a mastectomy. It combines journal entries with essays, among them “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, first given as a talk in 1977. She writes about fear of death, about the solidarity of women around her and about the pressure to wear a breast prosthesis, which she refused because it would make women with breast cancer invisible to one another. The book is regarded as an early text of illness writing from a feminist and lesbian perspective.
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