These series of installations, entitled Carcinoma le deuil impossible explore my experience with breast cancer. This work interweaves the experiences of my living body, history, and cultural construction of gender and ideal beauty. Breast cancer and its treatment place the body into a path of deformities, cicatrisation, transformations, and gender crisis. This experience incarnates as an encounter with newness and the body as raw material.

 Breast cancer or illness opens a space of multiple becoming because it destabilizes identity, and reconstitutes the feminine as raw material. The subject can then deploy multiple strategies as a testimonial to becoming- women, warrior, -  and commitment to social justice.

Illness is aporia, (anguish or confusion), in which the subject emerges with a new aesthetic of the self. This aesthetic is revealed in multiple practices such as the embellishment of scars with tattoos, photo-therapy, art production, writing practices, i.e., poetry, diaries, intellectual writing, and political activism. Illness is a passage of multiple mutations in which  “....every body is marked by history and specificity of its existence” (Grosz 1994, 142).

Beauty and gender in our culture are inscribed in the body, particularly with dolls we internalize ideal beauty, body without mark...  In this series my body and dolls enter the terrain of body modifications, medical intervention, history, sickness and  encompass suffering. As consequence, illness places the subject and her corporality on the path of interrogating memories, cultural constructions, socialization, the gendered breast, memories of the bodies and normalization.  These series of installations incorporates fiber, photography, and found objects.

References

E.A. Grosz Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

In Radical Historical Review , # 101 Spring 2008