Published in 1980, this a chronicle of poet Audre Lorde’s experience with breast cancer. She began writing journal entries a few months after her mastectomy.Lorde's eventually died from a recurrence of breast cancer.
When The Cancer Journals was published in 1980, Audre Lorde was already an important feminist poet. She had often criticized the popular feminist movement for focusing exclusively on white women, and she insisted on talking about race and class as compounding forms of oppression (STIGMA), including the racist assumptions white women brought to their feminism.
Audre Lorde asks in The Cancer Journals where she can find a model of how to deal with cancer, an understanding or a guide. She also questions Western medicine and asserts that women should control their own health and healing.
Women's Health & Empowerment: "Cancer Inc."
Audre Lorde writes that battling despair means surviving and fighting, and it means knowing that her work is part of a continuum of women’s work.
- She questions the powerful medical establishment's insistence on prosthetics and other advances to help people look “normal.” (REFUSES TO COVER OR PASS)
- Believes that an insistence on being physically normal interferes with a woman’s ability to heal.
- Wants to see women who with cancer as proud survivors
Silence is the Enemy:
Audre Lorde writes that when she was told her tumor was probably malignant she began contemplating her mortality.
- She found that what she most regretted were her silences.
- The book transforms silence, turning it into words and thus action.
