Something and Nothing: On the Psychopolitics of Breasts and Breastlessness

ABSTRACT

This article explores the social pressure to reconstruct the postmastectomy body. Relying on psychoanalytic and social theory, as well as personal experience, I observe that fetishism characterizes the prevailing discourse of breast reconstruction. I consider whether the urge to reconstruct the breast can be traced to a regressive desire to restore the first object. I also propose that breast reconstruction is recruited to resolve the gender anxiety that a postmastectomy woman’s absent breast(s) provoke. Although the recipient of breast augmentation is frequently pathologized, it is the woman who “refuses” reconstructive surgery who is often viewed as abnormal. Following Louise Kaplan’s (2000) definition of fetishistic strategy as the use of a vivid foreground to obscure a threatening background, reconstructed breasts can supply a vivid foreground that serves not only to attenuate the threat to life that cancer poses but also to obscure the challenge to normative gender constructions that visibly breast-free women prompt. Drawing on Winnicott’s (1953) concept of the transitional object and Helene Moglen’s (2008) formulation of transageing, I conclude by reflecting on how a breast lost to cancer can be creatively mourned.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Katie Gentile, Ann Pellegrini, Marita Sturken, Ben Kafka, Carlin Wing, Kristine Woods, H. Lan Thao Lam, and the anonymous readers who reviewed this text for their valuable input.

Notes

¹ Two years prior, in what has become a legendary comedy routine, Notaro had shocked another crowd by offhandedly greeting them with, “Hello. I have cancer,” followed by a recounting of a series of encounters with death, disease, and disaster that befell her within the span of 4 months.

² Although Freud does not state it here, this maternal role is not necessarily filled by the infant’s biological mother.

³ Winnicott (1960) defined the holding environment as the “total environmental provision” (p. 589).

⁴ The Mayo Clinic has updated their website to clarify this definition. It now reads: “Breast reconstruction is a surgical procedure that restores shape to your breast after mastectomy—surgery that removes your breast tissue to treat or prevent breast cancer.” To me this minor revision indicates a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of breastlessness and a more candid appraisal of breast reconstruction, not as a means to restore a breast but as a surgical procedure that approximates a breast’s shape.

⁵ This is true unless the person has a BRCA gene mutation or another very high risk factor.

⁶ I thank Ann Pellegrini for this insight.

⁷ Those who are BRCA+ have a genetic mutation that puts them at high risk for cancer (Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered [FORCE], 2014).

⁸ My saying that a reconstructed breast is artificial is not to say that the unaffected breast is not also a made object, that is, that it is made not only out of biological tissues but also through social interactions, biomedical practices, media representations, and sexual intimacies, to say the least. For analyses of the refiguring of subjectivity in terms of and through materiality, see, for instance, the new materialist work of Karen Barad (1998), Jane Bennett (2010, and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010).

⁹ I do not mean to critique the justification for preventative mastectomy in cases of genetic predisposition.

¹⁰ Sue Friedman, the founder of the BRCA patient advocacy organization FORCE, coined the term “previvor” to refer to survivors of a predisposition to cancer who have not had the disease (Nye, 2012, p. 105).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lana Lin

Lana Lin, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, New York. Her book on the psychic effects of cancer, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Lin is also an artist/filmmaker whose work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, NY, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival. She was a member in training at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis from 2006 to 2010.