Reviews with content warning for Medical content - The Cancer Journals

Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

7 reviews

stevia333k's review against another edition

hopeful reflective slow-paced

3.75

in case it needs to be said, while the research data needs to be updated & fact checked because the book is from 1978, the social model of disability framework is still work, just update the blanks.

I want to first preface this by saying that I've stalled on reading Audre Lorde for a long time because I've had conversion torturers weaponize her against me. This would be TERFs/white feminists/white supremacists etc. So when I was reading this work, I was trying to figure how the hell that happened. Therefore, if you want more connections about disability justice with this book, then you're going to need to read other perspectives/reviews of this book, though since I'm also disabled & took her indirect words to heart, some of that will come thru on this review.

The awkward part about this book is that while it's famous for the "your silence will not save you" quote, I've seen the 3rd part be used by conversion torturists. -- the thesis seems to be that prosthetic breasts don't have a medical function, and that the social model of disability & public health is not respected enough. So technically this means that medical transition for trans people can actually fit the description of what Lorde argues counts as medically necessary.

I've seen this play out online recently where cis women think all top surgery is like cancer treatment, where as trans men & trans nonbinary people are like we didn't even want the breasts to begin with. That is, it doesn't matter if it's natural or artificial, it can serve the functional role as cosmetic without medical purpose. Basically it's the difference between being a surviving spouse & being a spouse who killed their abusive spouse (& also -- not exactly lining up with the roles I'm talking about in this book or discourse, but borrowing from "are prisons obsolete" by Angela Davis -- being a surviving abuser who killed their spouse.)

Also Adrienne Rich is a transphobe, so it's awkward to hear her acting like a human to other women & girls. White "feminists" probably loved the book because one of the proposed praxis of accomodation-handicaps relies on the free market, as in more female CEOs of fashion companies. That runs in the face of "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house", and it doesn't exactly give nuance on how white women should be careful with analogies involving anti-blackness, on the basis of a shared disability, thereby further conflating womanhood & femaleness with disability, without necessarily the social model of disability kept in mind.

Content Warnings