A review by ralowe
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

5.0

it is disabling to even approach the structure/agency dilemma. this insovereign whirl is (near as i can tell, anyway) the field of ability; norms, categories, scenes, power relations. it's a spinning maelstrom that feels unnavigable, ungovernable. what happens to care, let alone social justice, in all this mess? i enjoyed the last essay the best. reading audre lorde reminds me of a moral ideal for how to be queer while providing care while confused and immobilized above the maddening circumabulating trigger spiral vortex. that's a lot, and it's a lot, and audre... i don't really want to reduce her to a mode or a style but something modal and stylish is in the utility of what is here. as she copes with cancer. so, yes, it also feels ghoulish. but in this book is what is generally good about an awareness of bodily modality, its finitude, and how care forms the self and is robust inspiring interpersonal relation, persons as ends-not-means. its good to momentarily know the/a self in the midst of all this mess. to find a grounding kinship in audre lorde. a way to pay queer attention to the body to dream of transformed power relations. i missed anything in lorde's text about aids, those moments seem to have missed each other in history, although her antiauthoritarian insurgent insight applies. cancer like aids is a product of many systems of domination and targets the most vulnerable. something that's interesting is her consideration of prosthesis, another opportunity for structure/agency headaches; diverging from the norm can be satisfying against the wake of the classist, racist and misogynist conditions that resulted in the mastectomy; the self is held within this fraught and contradictory space, or seems to be. i'm reminded of act up as she plots the living to follow the operation amid compulsory heteronormativity and legacies of colonialism, the numerous institutions working towards her undoing, how oppression inhibits a truthful social articulation of being with one's own body. i am in awe of audre lorde's anger, a moral ideal of coherence.