Fractured Borders: Reading Women’s Cancer Literature

Looks at the ways that literary artists have responded to women’s cancer through poetry, drama, fiction, autobiography, and environmental writing. Women have been writing about cancer for decades, but since the early 1990s, the body of literature on cancer has increased exponentially, as growing numbers of women face the searing realities of the disease and give testimony to its ravages and revelations.
Fractured Borders: Reading Women’s Cancer Literature
surveys a wide range of contemporary writing about breast, uterine, and ovarian cancer, including works by Marilyn Hacker, Margaret Edson, Carole Maso, Audre Lorde, Eve Sedgwick, Mahasweta Devi, Lucille Clifton, Alicia Ostriker, Jayne Anne Phillips, Terry Tempest Williams and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. Mary De Shazer’s readings bring insights from body theory, performance theory, feminist literary criticism, French feminisms, and disability studies to bear on these works, shining new light on a literary subject that is engaging more and more writers.