A survey of the empowering poetry of politically active women in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States.

This book's compelling subject is the narratives of contemporary writers and artists who probe the ravages of breast cancer. Mary K. DeShazer's focus is on memoirs and photographic narratives of breast cancer, a category she calls mammographies to signify both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have thisdisease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that contemporary breast cancer narratives differ from their predecessors in noteworthy ways, addressing neglected topics such as the links between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction. DeShazer explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrate how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.

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.