The Case of the Missing Areolae: Race and Breast Reduction Surgery — Page 10:
46 The use of the word “freak” by more than one young woman narrating her travails with her large breasts validates Gilman’s comment that the “abnormality” of large breasts consists of “being seen as different within the model of the racialized (or primitive) body. Women with large, pendulous breasts are not yet ‘New Women’ with small, firm breasts” (223). He also explains that to “examine the origins of aesthetic breast reduction, one must understand that [...] the reduction of the pendulous breast came to have meaning within another system of representation, that of race. [...] Smaller breasts represented ‘Germanness,’ as opposed to large, pendulous breasts, which were read as a sign of the primitive” (220).
47 She wants to know why the surgeons removed half of her areolae without any pre-surgery discussion with her. They seemed to take it as a given that it would be OK with her, and/or that removing all but a small 1 ½ inch dark brown coin around her nipples is standard in breast reduction surgery. Why? Especially when doing so involves losing all those milk ducts that the aureolae represent? But then, since breast reduction surgery often results in the inability to nurse, those milk ducts are no longer important? And, because of her being of a “certain age,” those milk ducts would no longer have relevance? Finally, what role did perceptions of her race play in correlation with her being of a “certain age” in the decision to decrease her patrimony (why is there no equivalence with matrimony?) of milk ducts? Would stitching back a larger areola be more difficult than trimming the areola’s circumference, resulting in a lesser amount of stitching to be done?
48 Not only does she ask why half of her areolae were spirited away in surgery, but also how did she come to be born with such areolae? Were her areolae representative of an expanding universe? Even with the areolae trimmed back, controlled, restrained, that which generated the original diffusing areolae still obtains.
49 Breast reduction techniques have evolved from the “anchor” scar to the “inverted T” to the “lollipop.” A plastic surgeon is quoted as referring to the “inverted T” as the “gold standard for the last 40 years.” From a nautical image on the chest to some kind of house construction tool image to a sweet to eat. Nice. How fitting. But none of the developments in breast reduction techniques pay any attention to the size of the areola, focusing almost entirely on reducing physical scarring at the center of the chest between the two breasts. This site of the largest accumulation of skin forms a junction.
50 Junction at the center of her chest over her sternum, my armour against the world, the center of her anchor, that forms a material manifestation of the non-material but not immaterial pain at the core of her being, being in-between and thus nowhere centered, which IS HER center, evolving into the rage with which she is quick, a rage not yet aborted even though the larger than white-size areolae as stigmata of enduring pregnancy with fury have been cut short; clearly she must give birth to the rage to release it from her body, but not with writing words (and the irony is that she needed to seek relief from the pain of the loss in resorting to the words of the calm research writer, the reading and writing that held her in their embrace so early, so soon, against the injuries of those who should have simply loved her, lest she explode too violently and be unable to continue—to live) words which exist to control, repress, demarcate, label, strangle, while her body aches to blaze up from the page and scream in your face of skin being pulled from various directions, pulled from various directions, repeat after me, pulled from various directions has a tendency to become either “hypertrophic or keloid” (Gilman 220).