The entire time I was reading Audre Lorde’s edition in The Cancer Journal, I kept thinking about my grandmother. My grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer 4 years ago. Lorde’s reaction to her finding the lump in her breast and dealing with having to have a mastectomy was very similar to my grandmother’s reaction. However, Lorde’s opposition to wearing a prosthetic breast was different. My grandmother had a difficult time losing her hair and breast. My mother, her caretaker and main supporter, reassured her that her health was more important than her looks. My grandmother always was a stickler for fashion and loved to dress up each and every day from head to toe. Losing two of her favorite physical attributes made the transition in caring more for her health difficult. I, too, have tried to reassure my grandmother that hair can grow; besides, she wore wigs to cover her beautiful hair when she had hair anyway. Audre Lorde’s description of the negative affects of the emphasis on physical pretense during a woman’s recovery were totally logic yet all too common. I can feel the pain in Lorde’s writing as she describes how society has influenced the ideology that to be woman is to be superficial (you know, that ‘women are to be seen and not heard’ kind of thing). I felt insulted when a nurse told Lorde that her walking around without a prosthetic was “bad for the morale of the office”; I felt it to be more appalling that it came from a woman who, supposedly, understands what women with breast cancer are dealing with. My grandmother has a prosthetic breast and she only wears it when she’s out in public. She’s mentioned to me on several occasions that she’s self-conscious and does not think she will ever feel comfortable again. I have watched my grandmother through the years suffer tremendously with almost every health issue known to man and as a result, she is currently inflicted with severe depression which affects everyone in the household. My mother and I have been remotely active in any and every breast cancer convention, workshop, and walk, and so on to educate ourselves in preventing the same thing to happen to us and the rest of the women in our family and to continue to support my grandmother. It’s funny that Lorde mentioned the “profit-hungry/marketing scheme the American Cancer Society has going because I just mentioned to a friend last week at a Breast Cancer Forum that it is amazing how much money these “Breast Cancer” companies are making. They have an entire marketing strategy, from the “pink ribbons” to paying cancer survivors to go around the world to talk about their experiences…Capitalism at its best. I hope that more and more women realize that preventing the reoccurrence of cancer and any other illness, educating all the women they know and reflecting internally about what is really important to their body image, self-image and health instead of pleasing others is vital to them being alive and staying alive. I will be sure to share this with my grandmother hoping she will realize that the beauty she has always possessed never faded away.
(re: picture- woman in pink: my grandmother, 2nd from left-me, others: members of SHAPE @ annual breast cancer walk 2006)
2 comments:
It really makes me sad how obsessed we are as women with beauty, and I say we because I know that I am obsessed too. I remember when I took images of women in the media sophomore year our prof. asked us how much money we spent on things such as hair and nails and clothing and makeup and I was too embarassed to even give my number. Society has totally brainwashed us on our concepts of beauty, flawless skin, long straight hair, skinny bodies with a curvy waist and ass, and big breasts and it seems like women are killing themselves in order to attain this unattainable beauty. What needs to be done so that we as women can collectively realize that we are beautiful just the way our creator made us and if we were supposed to look any other way than what we already do, we would.
My answer to blakelymarie's question of what has to be done is that we women must stop allowing the standards set by men to seep into image of each other. We know there is a standard of beauty however, we do not have to incorporate it into our personal standards. If women would begin to uplift those women they normally practice to tear down the walls that your list of standards hold up will begin to fall down. But tell me this, are we so obsessed with what men think of us that we cannot stop ourselves from degrading another woman?
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