Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison: Transforming Breast Cancer Stories into Action

by Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman

Depending on one’s vantage point, breast cancer can be a very different experience, and indeed, a very different concern.  It is, for some, a personal struggle; for others, it is a disease posing scientific and environmental challenges; and for others it is a highly charged and politicized issue around which policy wars rage. Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison brings a unique perspective to breast cancer by recognizing the overlapping relationship of all these realities. Drawing on the writings of Rachel Carson, Betty Ford, Rose Kushner, and Audre Lorde, this book explores the various ways in which patient-centered texts continue to leave their mark on the political realm of breast cancer and, ultimately, the disease itself. Ordered chronologically, the selections trace the progression of discussions about breast cancer from a time when the subject was kept private and silent to when it became part of public discourse. The texts included are personal accounts, written by women struggling to play an active role in their healing process and, at the same time, hoping to help others do the same.  Knopf-Newman also shows us how these writings eventually changed public opinion and the underlying tendency to blame women for their illness. She argues that changes in medical practice and public policy are linked to textual interventions, and makes a case for the politicization of cultural studies of disease through personal and literary expression.

Passionately written and well-researched, Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison transforms how we think about breast cancer.  Rather than facilitating forums for separate discussions, this book brings conversations into dialog with each other. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with breast cancer and its history, as well as for those interested in the effect of the environment on public health and the role that literature plays in public policy and medicine. 

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

Marcy Newman is also the editor of Jessie Redmon Fauset's The Chinaberry Tree & Selected Writings http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22... and The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66...

Reviews

[Samar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the way the author links literary matters with public policy issues. Plus this book is a constant reminder of the power of voice- and action. One cannot read it but wonder if one is doing enough to challenge injustices, in one's immediate milieu or at a broader level. Those who have been blessed with the power of language have a calling, to sprinkle their thoughts, if only on paper, as language takes on a life of its own. And to all women suffering from breast cancer or any other illness- don't suffer in silence.

[K. Lincoln · Rating 4 out of 5]

The lens through which I read this book is as a post-surgery, chemo, radiation breast cancer survivor (1 year!) lay person who is diving into both science-for-mass consumption books such as Emperor of All Maladies and The Truth in Small Doses, and breast cancer memoirs/histories such as Bathsheba's Breast and Cancer is a Bitch and Uplift. Now, along with the science framework and individual, humanized voices, I'm adding books that situate breast cancer and women's stories into a political context.

This book, like Malignant, opened my eyes to hidden aspects of being a white, heterosexual, middle class woman involved in breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship. While Malignant focused on the author's position as a queer person dealing with heternormative expectations on how breast cancer survivors should look, as well as the law aspect of medical malpractice and diagnosis, this book focuses on four women who used their previously un-empowered voices (as women, black, queer, passive patient) to form narratives that effected change.

The book reads like a sociological textbook, at times the prose is a bit too dense and too theoretical for someone like me to really appreciate and internalize. When it digressed into the feminist theory outside the confines of the women's narratives, it tended to lose me a bit. However, most of the book uses the women's lives to powerful effect.

The book begins with Rachel Carson of Silent Spring fame, and effectively compares her public battle against carcinogens with her very private battle with breast cancer and the toxins she took into her body to fight cancer. It moves on to Betty Ford, whose "white glove" treatment of cancer wedged open the door for other white, middle and upperclass women to begin talking about what had before been a shameful and secretive disease. Moving on to Rose Kushner, how the personal becomes political, and how women should have control over their own bodies are themes overlaid her fight to eradicate the Halstead Radical Mastectomy as well as to demand a separation of biopsy from surgical treatment (so women going to sleep for a biopsy wouldn't wake up unknowingly one-breasted).

Finally, the author takes black activist, mother, feminist, lesbian, poet, and cancer survivor Audre Lorde to further problematize the way in which US society perceives breast cancer diagnosis and survivorship. And it is her life, writings, and death that seem to resonate most strongly with the author.

"Lorde in particular enable me to apprehend several key concepts, many of which my mother's healing also depended on: the need to accept rather than hide one's postmastectomy body; the desire to have agency in one's own medical treatment...."

These two concepts, touched on from Rachel Carson all the way through Lorde herself are the two ideas that resonated strongly with me, as well. They are ideas I wish I had encompassed before my own terrible moment in the surgeon's office, being asked to decide, un-prepared, between lumpectomy and mastectomy, and even more, in the oncologist's office when faced with the frying pan or fire treatment choices of chemotherapy and radiation.

Being diagnosed with breast cancer is a horrifyingly dis-empowering experience. This book celebrates, without sugar-coating the pain and issues and need for further work, women whose voices have paved the way for better agency for those of us sisters in the US coming after.