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and subsequently published in the Cancer Journals (1980), seem startlingly
prophetic. Of course Lorde was not writing in a social vacuum,
but out of her experiences as a postmastectomy woman and in response
to several issues that emerged as she integrated the breast cancer crisis
into her life: the invisibility and silence of women with the disease,
prosthesis, amputation, the cancer-industrial complex, the relation
between cancer activism and antiracism, heteronormativity, and her
confrontation with mortality. Her purpose was to encourage women
to interrogate and speak out about the meaning of cancer in their
lives—“for silence,” she wrote, “has never brought us anything of worth”
(p. 10)—and to use their experiences to work for change. In the abovequoted
passage, Lorde’s specific concern was with the blame-the-victim
mentality of the breast cancer establishment, exemplified by a doctor
who had written a letter to a medical journal declaring that no truly
happy person ever gets cancer.
So how did we get from a national mind-set in which breast cancer
was viewed as a self-induced stigmatized disease and individual tragedy
best dealt with privately and in isolation, to one in which breast cancer
is viewed as an enriching and affi rming experience during which women
with breast cancer are never “patients,” but always survivors? What were
the historical conditions that once allowed a doctor to declare that the
truly happy never get cancer, and what are the conditions that now
enable us to think of breast cancer as a route to true happiness? And
what have the effects of this shift been in terms of the ways in which
breast cancer is understood and responded to?
These questions have been answered in part by a recent proliferation
of academic and popular writing on the emergence of breast cancer
activism in the United States. Taken as a whole, this writing recognizes
that a conjuncture of factors enabled the materialization of breast cancer
activism and the transformation of the U.S. public’s attitude toward the
disease: The women’s health movement (Brenner, 2000; Ehrenreich,
2001; Leopold, 1999a, which formed in the late 1960s, created an
environment in which women were encouraged to question their doctors
and the patriarchal practices and structures of the medical-industrial
complex, and to practice self-help and mutual support. During the same
period, the decision of several famous women—most notably Shirley
Temple Black (in 1972), Betty Ford (1974), and Happy Rockefeller
(1974)—to speak publicly about their breast cancer diagnoses was crucial
to the process of destigmatization (Altman, 1996; Ehrenreich, 2001;
Leopold, 1999a Lerner 2001). 1 The 1975 publication of Rose Kushner’s
Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report, in which she
criticized the practice of performing one-step mastectomies without the