Publications

Publication details [#67722]

Deshazer, Mary K. 2012. Postmillennial breast cancer photo-narratives: Technologized terrain. Social Semiotics 22 (1) : 13–30.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Annotation

Postmillennial photographic narratives that represent women's lived experience of breast cancer and its technologized terrain provide the focus of this essay, which offers a critical analysis of Catherine Lord's The Summer of Her Baldness (2004) and Lynn Kohlman's Lynn Front to Back (2005). The essay examines ways in which narrators and audiences construct multiple meanings regarding the somatic and symbolic contours of this disease. It explores what distinctive contributions to readers’ understandings of women's material and technologized bodies do twenty-first breast cancer photo-narratives offer, and how might feminist theories of illness, autobiography, and embodiment and postmodern constructions of narrative subjectivity enhance analysis and interpretation of breast cancer's textual and visual representations. It also discusses what discursive tropes and personae, visual and rhetorical strategies, ethical and aesthetic debates, and opportunities for discursive resistance and audience witness do these narratives engage.