The Case of the Missing Areolae: Race and Breast Reduction Surgery — Page 12:
61 Perhaps I disagree with Trinh Minh-ha when she writes “I say I write when I leave speech, when I lose my grip on it, and let it make its way on its own” (Woman, Native, Other 35). On the contrary, while I write I cling to an oral tradition precisely because it makes its way on its own, being less susceptible to control and a masculinist perception of order, as it sings, screams, moans, weeps, the words for which are but sickly pale labels for the reality of orality.
62 But still she persists to bridge the gap between orality and writing in expressing her loss. I am her advocate pressing her case.
63 The culture has yet to address the deeper hidden contexts of racial, gender, and sexual oppressions that manifest themselves in what the perfect breast should look like. Perhaps the Medieval standard for the breasts post reduction looking like two apples remains, but we are given no contemporary overt guidance as to what is a desired “shape,” the origin of the criteria, nor who decides. And silence remains about the areola.
64 She remains with the question whether, in having breast reduction surgery herself some six years ago, done by an Italian American surgeon and a dark-skinned Latino intern, both of them very attractive—sex is always in the frame—her multi-generational mixie breasts of a pale tan color with large brown areolae, lighter in shade than my darker brown nipples, and yet not as light a brown on the other side of the areola, a gradual change in terrain or text color, with no clear edge, were reconstructed to fit into white European-based criteria, and an unconscious emotional need for a racial edge between colors? Her personal reasons rested purely on historical distress at being female. Those reasons became corrupted by a system that racialized her original intent.
65 Returning from the blurry haze to created time, she hears a voice calling her name. She opens her eyes. The woman in white, adjusting the IV by the gurney on which her body lies, says to her, “Everything went well.” Perhaps.