Editorial — Page 2:
6 In contrast to Slater’s deliberately staged and faked illness narrative, Aimee Burke Valeras’s contribution focuses on the examples of four women with hidden disabilities and their daily decisions of whether to disclose their disabilities or to “pass” for able-bodied, as Valeras explains. Valeras intersects these four case studies with her own example, suffering herself from Muscular Dystrophy. Here, too, all illness narratives reveal the difficulties and complexities of self-disclosure as well as of the process of identity formation. Mary’s Mitochondrial Myopathy, Victoria’s Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, Angela’s Epilepsy, Rosalina’s Celiac Disease, and the author’s own Muscular Dystrophy provide ample examples of how concepts of self—both as women and disabled—are affected by everyday performances. Valeras points out how women with unapparent disabilities live with the paradox of fulfilling neither society’s expectations of femininity nor the feminist call to resist stereotypical feminization. Disabled women live in-between two worlds—both in the nondisabled world and in the disability world—and have to cope with the expectations of both.
7 Stella Bolaki’s essay is the first of three essays that deal with women’s strategies of dealing with breast cancer. She, too, explains that illness narratives in their various sub-genres are one way of coming to terms with such traumatic experiences. Such narratives, as all contributors suggest, give voice to those who are affected as well as possibly power to effect change, for example, in doctor-patient relationships. With her example, Martha Hall’s artists’ books, Bolaki demonstrates how Hall hoped for an impact on future physicians and the medical community by inviting her readers as witnesses to her story of illness. Bolaki suggests that since doctors are faced with patients’ narratives that need to be interpreted, artists’ books could become part of a doctor’s training. The advantage of artist’s books over other illness narratives is that they return their readers to the body because of their materiality, i.e., the material the artist uses to produce them.
8 In contrast to Martha Hall’s artist’s books, Julia Mason analyzes the representation of breast health in 32 articles selected from a total of 44 American women’s magazines consulted. As she argues, many women increasingly use these magazines for information about breast health, and, at the same time, they also publish their personal narratives in order to give voice to their experiences and to inform other women. Mason, too, suggests that these narratives have an empowering function for both their readers and their writers. However, these narratives, since they are written in a specific cultural context, often reinforce narrow social constructions of gender. A greater variety of these personal narratives in magazines, which right now are mostly written by heterosexual white and African American women, would enhance the insight that breast health in general and breast cancer in particular do not just have individual but also social and medical dimensions and, as Mason points out, would ultimately increase the potential for women’s empowerment.
9 Cecile Ann Lawrence’s discussion of race and breast reduction surgery continues the issue’s focus on the intersection of women’s health, the body, and constructions of femininity in the context of medical discourses and doctor-patient relationships. Lawrence intersperses her theoretical discussion of what it means to have breast reduction surgery with a third-person narrative in the stream-of-consciousness style, an auto-ethnography, as she terms it, in which she foregrounds the tension for those women who undergo such a treatment. In contrast to the previous contributions, Lawrence thematizes not so much the implications of the illness narrative but rather those of cosmetic surgery and, perhaps also, whether such procedures are, as she terms it, “medically necessary.” Furthermore, Lawrence suggests that the “right” size and shape of breasts in / after surgery are determined by the (subjective) male point of view, represented, for example, in the fact that most surgeons are still male, as Lawrence posits. The narrative difference between a theoretical and scholarly discussion and a personal narrative, also reflected in the choice of italics for the latter, lies in the notion of emotional distance. A rather rational analysis is complemented by emotional immediacy—a technique which facilitates the “narrat[ion] of the unnarratable” (Rimmon-Kenan 241) and brings together and effects more humane understanding between doctor and patient.