Breast cancer’s rhetoricity: bodily border crisis and bridge to corporeal solidarity

ABSTRACT

Responding to Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking text Illness as Metaphor, this article analyzes breast cancer as a figure of entanglement, drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism. Communication scholars have fruitfully explored discursive constructions of breast cancer, but a material–discursive analysis of the disease, and the significant site it inhabits, provides a more robust account of the constraints and opportunities configuring bodies and social movements. To make the case, I show that agential realism is equipped to grasp breast cancer’s rhetoricity as it destabilizes binary codes of being, including language/matter, subject/object, and human/nonhuman. I then offer the concept of transmaterial intra-actionality to track entanglements of disease and target the political stakes of accounting for human and nonhuman life. I conclude with a call for corporeal solidarity: a posthuman politics that acknowledges connections across and through bodies.

KEYWORDS:

• agential realism
• breast cancer
• transgender
• binary codes of being
• transmaterial intra-actionality
• corporeal solidarity

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Aren Z. Aizura, Elliott H. Powell, Kari Smalkoski, Siri Suh, and the anonymous reviewers for generative feedback on this essay, as well as to Chris Gamble and Joshua Hanan for enthusiasm and precise guidance as I crafted my contribution to their special issue. This article is dedicated to my mother, Rosemarie A. Hill, who I lost to cancer in 1999, and to Karen Barad, the mentor I was so fortunate to find that same year.

Notes

1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).

2. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 102.

3. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 5.

4. Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: BasicBooks, 1994). Streptomycin is not TB’s “magic bullet” cure, but one part of an antibiotic cocktail; its overuse contributes to antibiotic resistance, which is reopening the closing door against infectious diseases.

5. Paula A. Treichler “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” October 43 (1987): 48–49. In addition to homophobic responses to AIDS, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control targeted Haitians as the only ethnic group at high risk of contracting the disease, thereby constituting them as a threat to Americans and reviving the racial and sexual stigma that marked African Americans as vectors of TB and venereal disease.

6. Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse,” 43. The shift in the first and final names of the disease—from GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) to AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) and HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)—speaks to material–metaphorical entanglements, rather than a supplanting of metaphor with medical reality.

7. Celeste Condit, “The Materiality of Coding: Rhetoric, Genetics, and the Matter of Life,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 328.

8. Condit, “The Materiality of Coding,” 334.

9. Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2006): 257–58.

10. I am not claiming that deconstruction in toto refuses to take up the entanglement of meaning and matter, but highlighting the habit of analyses that only critique language. I am also targeting analyses that erect a binary between language and matter, with the former atop the latter.

11. Karen Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 34.

12. Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,” Parallax 20, no. 3 (July 2014): 175.

13. For recent work on new materialism in Rhetoric, see Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Laurie E. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015); and Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif, ed. “Extrahuman Rhetorical Relations: Addressing the Animal, the Object, the Dead, and the Divine,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 346–53.

14. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 814. Emphasis omitted.

15. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 815. For Barad, subjects and objects emerge within phenomena through specific relations or intra-actions; they do not precede relations as discrete entities that interact. This onto-epistemology is a radical shift from the Kantian division and Cartesian cut posing inherent properties of, and boundaries between, subjects and objects.

16. Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1998): 121.

17. U.S. Breast Cancer Statistics, www.breastcancer.org. Underneath blanket statistics lie worlds of difference in diagnosis, treatment, and morbidity.

18. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (New York: Scribner, 2010), 37.

19. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies 38. Original emphasis.

20. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies 38.

21. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies 39.

22. Richard A. Rogers, “Overcoming the Objectification of Nature in Constitutive Theories: Toward a Transhuman, Materialist Theory of Communication,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 261.

23. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 821.

24. Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction,” in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed. Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 187.

25. Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 392–3.

26. Zach Strassburger, “Disability Law and the Disability Rights Movement for Transpeople,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 24, no. 2 (2012): 343.

27. Susan M. Love, “Foreword,” in Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic, ed. Anne S. Kasper and Susan J. Ferguson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), viii.

28. Jeanne Vaccaro, “Feelings and Fractals: Wooly Ecologies of Transgender Matter,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (June 2015): 285.

29. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition to Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

30. Kelly E. Happe, “The Body of Race: Toward a Rhetorical Understanding of Racial Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 147.

31. Adele E. Clarke et al. “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine,” American Sociological Review 68, no. 2 (2003): 181.

32. Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2012).

33. National Breast Cancer Foundation, www.nationalbreastcancer.org

34. Amy L. Brandzel, “The Subjects of Survival: The Anti-Intersectional Routes of Breast Cancer,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 & 2 (2016): 136–37.

35. Black people in the United States carry the heaviest bodily burden related to cancer: for all cancers combined, the death rate for Blacks is 25 percent higher than for Whites. National Cancer Institute, www.cancer.gov

36. Brandzel, “The Subjects of Survival,” 136.

37. Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 3 (1994): 240–41.

38. Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2 & 3 (June 2015): 392–93.

39. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.

40. Jasbir K. Puar, “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 2, no. 1 (2012): 56.

41. Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 58.

42. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 111.

43. Vicki Kirby uses the term “intra-sectionality” against the seeming coherence of any spoken word because of “a complex vitality of entangled stratifications, an intra-sectionality that informs the word’s apparent unity with a fracturing, or more accurately, a diffraction-ing, that is meaning-making.” Vicki Kirby, “Human Exceptionalism on the Line,” SubStance 43, no. 2 (2014): 55.

44. Nikki Sullivan, “Somatechnics,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1 & 2 (2014): 188.

45. Sullivan, “Somatechnics,” 188.

46. On the animacy of toxicants, see Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

47. On nonhuman rhetoric see, for instance, Natasha Seegert, “Play of Sniffication: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 158–78; Emily Plec, ed. Perspectives on Human-­Animal Communication: Internatural Communication (New York: Routledge, 2013); Melissa Autumn White, “Viral/Species/Crossing: Border Panics and Zoonotic Vulnerabilities,” Women Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2012): 117–37; and Diane Davis, “Autozoography: Notes Toward a Rhetoricity of the Living,” Rhetoric and Philosophy 47, no. 4 (2014): 533–53.

48. Anna Munster, “Transmateriality: Toward an Energetics of Signal in Contemporary Mediatic Assemblages,” Cultural Studies Review 20, no. 1 (2014): 159.

49. Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 43.

50. The increasing focus on “cancer genes” reintroduces a species of atomism; recalls the genealogical cause of “consumption”; and deflects attention from environmental risk factors by locating cancer’s cause in a closed body with a corrupted code. Condit argues defining the gene as a discrete object “provides a paradigmatic example of the way in which language constructs an objectified essence where none exists in nature … and thus provides a terministic screen that both enables and misleads,” (“The Materiality of Coding,” 334).

51. Shop Komen’s webpage states that for each new Pink Ribbon BankAmericard Cash Rewards^™ MasterCard^® that is used to make a transaction within, and remains open for, 90 days, it receives at least $3 and 0.08% of all retail purchases (less returns). www.shopkomen.com

52. Breast Cancer Action, “Overview: Policy Solutions,” www.bcaction.org

53. Brandzel, “The Subjects of Survival,” 131.

54. Brandzel, “The Subjects of Survival,” 142.

55. Cures are not final solutions or amnesty from nature’s agency, but intra-active mediations with disease. Cancer is considered cured when it can no longer be detected in the body over a certain time, typically five years; however, given cancer’s ability to move and rematerialize, being cured is a tenuous, sometimes temporary, state. Furthermore, what is a disease and what is a cure can be a dicey business. Adele Clarke et al. note how menopause became “transformed in the West from a complex and unevenly symptomatic syndrome into a standardized ‘estrogen deficiency disease’ treatable by hormone replacement therapies (now deemed dangerous after 60 years of increasingly intense use),” (“Biomedicine,” 183).

56. Jasbir K. Puar, “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled,” Social Text 124 33, no. 3 (2015): 53.

57. Eli Clare, “Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Disability Rights Movement,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 262.

58. For personal accounts that track the politics of cancer see, for example, Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, special edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2006); Zillah Eisenstein, Manmade Breast Cancers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Susan Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Boston: De Capo Press, 2010).

59. Puar, “Bodies with New Organs,” 57.

60. Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse,” 65.

61. Tasha N. Dubriwny, “Constructing Breast Cancer in the News: Betty Ford and the Evolution of the Breast Cancer Patient,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 33, no. 2 (2009): 122.

62. Sarah Lochlann Jain, “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics,” Representations 98 (Spring 2007): 88, 90.

63. On sidestream cancer activism, see Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–65; Maren Klawiter, The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Barbara Brenner, So Much to Be Done: The Writings of Breast Cancer Activist Barbara Brenner, ed. Barbara Sjoholm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

64. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).

65. S. Lochlann Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 24.

66. Judith Butler and Maureen MacGrogan, ed. Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.

67. Barad, “TransMaterialities,” 410.