from NWSA Journal Volume 15, Number 2

Excerpt from

Fractured Borders: Women's Cancer and Feminist Theatre

MARY K. DESHAZER

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This essay analyzes four plays from the 1990s that represent women's cancer from feminist perspectives: Margaret Edson's Wit, Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis's Sistahs, Susan Miller's My Left Breast, and Lisa Loomer's The Waiting Room. It argues that women's performance narratives differ from other cancer narratives by employing "explicit bodies" onstage to mark cancerous breasts, ovaries, and wombs as transgressive sites of social meaning; by challenging the capacity of a spectatorial gaze to appropriate women's ill bodies; and by fostering reciprocity among playwrights, actors, and audience. To elaborate on these points, the essay examines the diverse representations of body politics and medical politics in the plays under consideration and discusses how and why feminist theatre can move audiences toward activism.

Keywords: body politics / explicit bodies / feminist body theory / feminist theatre / illness testimonials / medical politics / reciprocity / spectatorial gaze / women and cancer

I have stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. There is no stage five. Oh, and I have to be very tough. It appears to be a matter, as the saying goes, of life and death.

—Margaret Edson, Wit (1999, 12)

I am a One-Breasted, Menopausal, Jewish Bisexual Lesbian Mom and I am the topic of our times. I am the hot issue. I am the cover of Newsweek, the editorial in the paper. I am a best-seller. And I am coming soon to a theatre near you.

—Susan Miller, My Left Breast (1995, 219)


The women's cancer movement is indeed the "topic of our times" after decades—some would say centuries—of silence and denial by many physicians, researchers, and sometimes women themselves. "THE NEW THINKING ON BREAST CANCER," screams the 18 February 2002 cover of Time magazine, "The Smartest Drugs/The Gentlest Treatments/The Latest on Mammograms" (Gorman). Inside, the article reports that 200,000 U.S. women will learn each year that they have breast cancer, double the number from 1980. Forty thousand will die from it. The article acknowledges that the American Cancer Society's emphasis on mammograms might have resulted in overdiagnoses, causing thousands of women who might otherwise live long and healthy lives to undergo invasive radiation and chemotherapy treatments for microscopic cancers and even pre-cancerous conditions. The article further claims that tamoxifen, hailed in the early 1990s as an estrogen-based drug that could both treat breast cancer and reduce the risk of contracting it, may increase the risk of uterine cancer. At the same time, the author hails new research methods in the battle against breast cancer and glibly promises readers "a guide to saving lives" (50).1

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