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The cancerous body is at the center of my current inquiry. Cancer carves its distinctive marks into the flesh. The embodied, lived narrative of cancer is quite different from the narrative presented by those behemoths - the medical system and pharmaceutical industry. I bring both a medical humanities and a second wave feminist view of the body to this material.
Cancerous Body is a series investigating the embodied experience of living with cancer. Text, from journal writing and interviews, is integrated into these works as both a visual element as well as a site of meaning. Bodies become defined by text. The cancerous body is written on by cultural attitudes towards cancer, as well as the individual’s daily experience of the disease and its treatment. As patients we hand over our cancerous bodies to be poisoned and prodded, questioned and bled. We live from test result to test result, always fearful that the numbers will signal either more treatments with their collateral damage or a new relationship with mortality. The medical profession’s currency is our bodies and yet the materiality, the embodied flesh of our existence is often left unacknowledged. The images in Cancerous Body address the gap between these two narratives.