Demilitarizing Disease: Ambivalent Warfare and Audre Lorde's "The Cancer Journals".

"For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it."--Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" (Sister Outsider 43)

"But the fact remains that in the government agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under a well-centralized administration, while bridges were still the object of active, dynamic, and collective experimentation."--Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus (43)

If there is a universal law of TV drama series, it would be this: eventually there will be an "episode you can't miss." When the Showtime series the L word began hyping its "unmissable" episode in the winter of 2006, the commercial featured not, as might be expected, a high-paced montage of jaw-droppingly shocking scenes, but a single image: that of an empty bed. The effect was two-pronged. It alerted viewers, one, to the fact that the person to whom the bed belongs--Dana, a character diagnosed with breast cancer a few weeks earlier--was not in it; secondly, it reiterated the L word as a bedroom drama. Since the series' inception in 2004, the show has billed itself as a no-holds-barred look at lesbian life, by lesbians themselves, in and out of the bedroom ("fighting, fucking, crying, drinking, writing, winning, losing, cheating, kissing, thinking, dreaming--this is the way that we live, and love!" the show's theme song proudly announces). The series' breast cancer plotline was considered no less "groundbreaking" by its producers. But despite their insistence that their show was "the one that's not afraid to talk about" the disease, in the last two decades breast cancer has become quite prevalent in mainstream media targeted at women: think of Brenda's scare on the teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 (1991), Alex's chemotherapy on the thirtysomething-targeted Sisters (1993), Samantha's lumpectomy on the wildly popular Sex and the City (2004), or the preventative double-mastectomy and hysterectomy performed on a patient with a "breast cancer gene" on the runaway hit Grey's Anatomy (2005). In that the L word is unique as being one of the first popular television series wholly concerned with lesbian life, however, one might legitimately ask whether its presentation of a lesbian's experience with breast cancer would have satisfied black feminist poet Audre Lorde's 1980 demand for the "dyke insight" of lesbians "who had had mastectomies" (Journals 49). Director/producer Rose Troche's assertion that the episode reflects that "there's nothing that guarantees you're not going to get breast cancer," however, mystifies "the distinct and identifiable" causes of cancer Lorde repeatedly points to in her work The Cancer Journals (73), where she uses her own experience with breast cancer as, in Elizabeth Alexander's words, "a metaphor for the dangers of growing up poor, female, and black" (708). Indeed, the producers' presentation of breast cancer as equal-opportunity monster (through the experience of a beautiful, thin, white, young, rich woman) evades the fact that now, as in 1980, you are much more likely to die of breast cancer if you are black or poor (Casamayou; Eisenstein; Hardisty and Leopold; Kasper). Thus the episode reads as no more "groundbreaking" than the American Cancer Society's glib announcement (under the heading "Risk Factors [for breast cancer] You Cannot Change') that "Simply being a woman is the main risk factor for developing breast cancer." Ultimately, the L word's script was precisely that: a "normalized" (Sturken 175) understanding where all women are at risk for breast cancer and all women who experience breast cancer will experience it as a fragmentation of their femininity, regardless of how that woman experienced her femininity--or her relationship to her breasts--to begin with. Breast cancer here is posited as a private trauma rather than a public concern and the "function of cancer in a profit economy," in Lorde's words (Journals 9), is elided: nowhere is there mention of the well documented manner by which cancer research is compromised by corporate interests (Eistenstein; Zones) or the way "the effects of global capital--poverty for great numbers, air pollution, and soil depletion--create environments that are disproportionately cancer producing, especially for poor people of color" (Eisenstein 94-95). So while Lorde might have been intrigued by the portrayal of a lesbian with breast cancer on a popular television drama, it seems to me that what she might find more intriguing--and ultimately discouraging--is that the narrative of breast cancer given to us in 2007 is so fundamentally unchanged from the one she fought in 1980.

One seemingly intrinsic aspect of this narrative is the militarization of the body, the ways in which both medical and popular narratives of the disease "construct vivid portrayals of innate and hidden cancer-causing agents such as cells, hormones, and genes ... described in a language that depicts them as hostile forces at war with the body" and, by extension, imply that the female body is "innately diseased, unstable, and problematic" because these forces exist within it (Fosket, Karran, and LaFia 314-15). This metaphor of warfare is not specific to breast cancer: as writers ranging from Michel Foucault to Emily Martin to Marita Sturken have shown, the metaphor of warfare, appropriated in narratives of diseases from tuberculosis to schizophrenia to AIDS, serves a particular function in the modern nation-state in much the same way as do the racial or sexual categories which Lorde fundamentally opposed. In other words, the understanding of the body as combat zone is not "natural," but is one overwritten on the body to such a degree that it seems that way. While it may seem instinctual to experience disease as warfare, to assume that biological sex can tell us something about gender, or to interpret certain characteristics as intimately connected to the color of someone's skin, these are social constructions that have become, literally, internalized. Western medicine might argue that, "objectively" speaking, its goal is to destroy agents (cells, germs, viruses) that would otherwise destroy a human life, and that by virtue of this fact cannot be understood in any other framework than that of battle. Yet this is a specifically Western understanding of disease that is by no means universal. For when we talk about medicine, we also talk about "a set of beliefs about what an organism is and what disease is" and the "taxonomies of diseases and the medicines that ostensibly cure them grow up in conspiracy with each other in a larger and more complex field of meanings and references than is ever admitted" (Grossinger 15-16). That is to say, the language (not to mention the conclusions) of any science reflects the particular society within which it exists, claims to objectivity notwithstanding. Referring to the experience of disease as warfare would be completely foreign in the context of traditional Chinese medicine, for example, since while Western medicine "is primarily concerned with isolable disease categories or agents of disease, which it zeroes in on, isolates, and tries to change, control, or destroy," Chinese medicine "directs" its "attention to the complete physiological and psychological individual" from which it deciphers a "pattern of disharmony" or "situation of 'imbalance' " (Kaptchuk 4). The language Chinese medicine utilizes, in fact, is distinctly at odds with the militarized rhetoric of Western medicine, and such discrepancies in the way different medical systems approach the same disease belies the constructedness of the languages we take for granted as "natural" or "objective."

It is not surprising that many turn to the military metaphor for strength because of its rootedness in a Western context, but as I will show through a reading of Lorde's experiences with breast cancer, these metaphors of conflict often only engender more conflict in the individual experiencing disease and thus it is well worth questioning whether we would not be better served by different metaphors. (1) "There is," as Zillah Eisenstein writes, "very little that is natural or given." "When these politicized layerings are neutralized as part of the naturalized landscape," she continues, "no one asks why more black and latino women are not part of the breast cancer drug trials, or why Viagra was not developed first for women, or why silicone breast implants were ever marketed in the first place" (85). Part of Lorde's accomplishment in The Cancer Journals is her investment in asking these types of questions. "Although Lorde describes the pain and reality of losing a breast, she also understands the social ramifications of loss" (Major) and, further, explicitly extends that investment to her readers. The conceit of academic discourse, of course, is that the intellectual can and must wax theoretical rationally, stoically, and if not downright anonymously, then certainly without getting caught up in the petty exigencies of her body. Yet Lorde's work asks us unequivocally to "enter" our work and "see what it tells [us] about [our]selves" (Hammond 27), to recognize the interlaced quality of the discursive, the political, the sexual, and the personal. So when I read The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light, the journal entries Lorde compiled when she learned her breast cancer had metastasized into her liver, and find myself confronting instances in which the metaphor of warfare reads more like a stumbling block than a source of strength, separating it from the rest of her project, and creating interstices during which Lorde grapples with the ways in which this metaphor does not serve her, I have to ask whether the structures which present women with such "battles" in the first place are the most useful articulation toward surviving them. If Lorde explicitly argues that "every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself actively with her own health" (Journals 73), she also implicitly demands that we question whether we are best served by thinking of ourselves as militants. If Lorde's journals are a call to arms against the "imposed silences" that serve as "a tool for separation and powerlessness" in ways that are, both literally and figuratively, killing us (Journals 9), then I am also obliged to ask: when it comes to the way I experience my body, is it arms I want to come to? Is there an alternative vocabulary?

Like any disease, breast cancer is politically charged, and politically framed. Here the AIDS crisis comes to mind, which in the 1980s and '90s spawned a corresponding "epidemic of signification" (Treichler 11) where AIDS was by turns imagined as the result of CIA conspiracies, aliens, and God's wrath (Sturken; Cohen). As Foucault points out repeatedly, health itself becomes in modern times a civic duty, deviance from which warrants a variety of disciplinary measures. Because illness plays a particular role in the construction of "a fantasy of wholeness which lives at the root of all of the bipolar images of difference (health vs. disease; good vs. bad; white vs. black)" (Gilman 5), it follows that disease is often figured as an invasion in both popular media accounts and scientific writings. And if our bodies are imagined as representatives of the nation, then these invasions fall, unsurprisingly, within specific--ethnocentric and racialist, if not racist--constructs of otherness: American immune systems apparently find it "as difficult to detect foreignness" as a "Caucasian" would find it to "pick out a particular Chinese interloper at a crowded ceremony in Peking's main square" (Sturken 224), and the AIDS virus is imagined as a terrorist or Arab suicide bomber (Sturken 228). What these metaphors do is make warfare and violence seem natural; if warfare is always-already happening within the body, then it is expected among bodies. That we have an "internal army" (Martin, "Immunology" 411) speaks to the need for an external one. These images do the "ideological work" of making "violent destruction seem ordinary and part of the necessity of daily life" (Martin, "Immunology" 417).

Such ideological work not only naturalizes violence in the world around us but elides certain realities of the body as well. What of the "foreign" viruses and bacteria that live without "violence" and contribute to the body in a neutral way? Our bodies may sometimes act "defensively," but often they do not. We do not expel everything that finds its way within us, whether it be particles in the air we breathe, bacteria from the hands we shake, fluids from the sexual encounters we have. Further, militarized metaphors have a clear masculinist bent: part of the reality of my own body as I sit writing this essay is a being growing within me yet also not me, kicking at the books perched on my stomach with motivations I can only guess. While this process may be experienced as prolonged and even severe illness for some, especially early on, suffice it to say that most pregnant women would prefer not to imagine their bodies as the site of violence. Similarly, while it is clear that Lorde derives a certain amount of strength from military metaphors in both The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light, which she describes as "a report from the frontlines" (59), it is equally clear that at times the metaphor fails to speak to the nuances of what she experiences.

It must be recognized before continuing that there is a particular way in which the military metaphor functions on the level of the spectacle for Lorde, and her appropriation of it reflects her embedment in a black nationalist discourse embodied in the 1960s and '70s by "the kind of guerilla theater" of the Black Panthers (Singh 203). That is, the very nature of The Cancer Journals (which, in fact, do not read like journal entries at all, but like essays) is to take the private experience of illness and make it accessible to a public community which might then mobilize toward anti-cancer activism. The genre itself is slippery; it is meant to be a particularly intimate or confessional form and yet is clearly performative as well. The function of publishing the journal is mirrored by Lorde's refusal to wear a prosthetic breast, thus making the "truth" of her illness visible in the public arena. In all cases someone else must be there to receive and translate these truths into "an army of one-breasted women descend[ing] upon Congress and demand[ing] that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed" (Lorde, Journals 16).

But if a sort of performative self-invention is the goal here, the institutionalized work that the body-at-war metaphor does is at odds with Lorde's desire to build a recognition "that our interests are not being served by the systems we support" (Sister 139). The language itself, further, seems fundamentally insufficient when translated to her body, as when Lorde looks at her post-mastectomy chest for the first time and, "expecting it to look like the ravaged and pitted battlefield of some major catastrophic war," is surprised to find only her own "same soft brown skin" (Journals 44). The militarized language she has at her disposal is not the language her body actually speaks. The scar, a new part of her body she hopes to "integrate" (Lorde, Journals 16) is repeatedly described as "smooth and tender and untroubled" (Lorde, Journals 45) or "placid and inoffensive," more like "the trussed rump of a stuffed goose" than the site of violence (Journals 55).

In fact, despite the assumption that to some extent militarized metaphors have become naturalized who of us has not referred to someone's "battle with cancer" more or less unconsciously?--it is by no means instinctive for Lorde to think of herself as a warrior. Rather, she must work her way, over the course of her recovery, toward imaging herself as one. In her earliest journal entries, articulating her experience as warfare is not what helps her overcome her pain, but the writing of her "biomythography," Zami, which, it is worth mentioning, is not particularly concerned with figuring Lorde as a warrior: "The novel is finished at last. It has been a lifeline.... My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women" (Journals 13). "The love of women" (embodied by the "warm hand" of her partner Frances), not the metaphor of warfare, brings Lorde strength after her second biopsy as well. While later in the narrative Lorde positively appropriates the image of the Amazons, female warriors from Dahomey who supposedly removed their right breasts so as to become stronger archers, early on the image only serves to make her feel weak:

       I woke up in the recovery room after the biopsy colder than I can
   remember ever having been in my life.... All I could focus on was
getting
   out of that room and getting warm. I yelled and screamed and
complained
   about the cold and begged for extra blankets, but none came.... I
   couldn't believe this hospital couldn't shut off the air
conditioning or
   give me more blankets. The Amazon girls were only 15, I thought, how
did
   they handle it? (Journals
 27-28) 

She repeats later: "How did the Amazons of Dahomey feel? ... they did this willingly, for something they believe in. I suppose I am too but I can't feel that now" (Lorde, Journals 35; italics added). And after her mastectomy, Lorde takes on warriorhood as something of a defense mechanism against those who would make her feel inadequate. Ten days after the surgery she returns to her doctor's office, feeling nurtured after a friend washes her hair and helps her get ready; she imagines that she emanates "that brave new-born security of a beautiful woman having come through a very hard time" not a war, mind you--and who is "very glad to be alive" (Lorde, Journals 58). Yet while she expects the nurse to compliment her on her appearance, she is instead chastised for not wearing a prosthetic breast: "we really like you to wear something when you come in. Otherwise it's bad for the morale of our office" (Lorde, Journals 59). It is the nurse who interpellates Lorde into the discourse of militarism; within this kind of landscape it is no wonder Lorde's reaction is to insist:

    ... when Moishe Dayan, the Prime Minister of Israel, stands up in
front
   of parliament or on TV with an eyepatch over his empty eyesocket,
nobody
   tells him to go get a glass eye, or that he is bad for the morale of
the
   office. The world sees him as a warrior with an honorable wound....
Well,
   women with breast cancer are warriors also. I have been to war, and
still
   am.... For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a
   casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air
pollution,
   McDonald's hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still
going on
   and I am still part of it. (Journals
 60) 

Yet one of the major problems with militarized metaphors of the body is that they ultimately detach those scars from this larger public context and instead transpose disease into the rhetoric of "the agential soldier" (Wu 259). Most popular narratives of breast cancer, in fact, "effectively shift our focus away from larger social, environmental, political, and economic issues surrounding breast cancer and, instead, blame individual women for their illness" by suggesting that women are "responsible for detecting, preventing, and surviving breast cancer" (Fosket, Karran, and LaFia 304). This is part and parcel of the body-as-nation metaphor: if "the national idea in an individualist egalitarian democracy" is that each body is self-governing, autonomous, and progressive--a "microcosm" of the state itself (Gilman 45)--then too often a particular body's vulnerability may be written away by the attribution "bad things happen for a reason," and the disease becomes a failure of the individual (immorality, sexual deviance, melancholia). We see this in the L word; while the cause of Dana's cancer is mystified, she is simultaneously blamed for its spread: the lump has "been there forever," she tells her lover nonchalantly, simply a part of her "very sexy fibrous breasts." She did not control her body as she should have, the show suggests; she should have known to get it checked out earlier. She shirked her responsibility.

Lorde is well aware of some aspects of this. She derides a doctor, for example, for suggesting "that no truly happy person ever gets cancer," maintaining that such an outlook is a "monstrous distortion of the idea that we can use our psychic strength to heal ourselves" (Journals 74). And yet Lorde cannot escape the sense that part of the "battle" against cancer is indeed a battle of the will: the disease is "a very bad dream" from which she must "wake [her]self up" (Light 54) while "despair" is a cancer in and of itself (Journals 12). Thus the very language of warfare that is offered her to provide strength "impose[s] a vocabulary of competency and blame" (Sturken 225-26) that ultimately alienates her from her body. The perversion of cancer, of course, is that it is not a virus, an invasion, that "Chinese interloper" the immune system cannot identify; it is understood, rather, as the body attacking itself. Acknowledging external "carcinogens" only insofar as the individual can control them--i.e., by eating right, working out, buying the appropriate products, choosing the correct vaccines--popular understandings of cancer imagine it as a kind of "demonic pregnancy" (Sontag 14), conceived in oneself, born into oneself, held in oneself. Within this context, alienation seems inevitable: despite Lorde's assertion that her "blood, or ... heart, or ... eyes" are "inseparable" from her writing (Rowell 93), the images surrounding her experience facilitate a slipping into the Cartesian split between Cancer (body) and Warrior (mind): "I had grown angry at my breast because I felt as if it had in some unexpected way betrayed me, as if it had already become separate from me and had turned against me by creating this tumor which might be malignant. My beloved breast had suddenly departed from the rules we had agreed upon to function all these years" (Journals 33). Such dissociation from her body returns again and again, with Lorde "trying to find out what [her] body wants to do" (Light 85), and waiting for her "body [to] decide if it will live or die" (Light 78). It is an alienation Lorde works against in the rest of her writings.

Reading The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light alongside Zami emphasizes this disconnect. Take, for example, Lorde's troubled first love Gennie, who makes an appearance in The Cancer Journals as part of a "tattoo" Lorde imagines in her heart, composed of the "names of women who did not survive" (Journals 40). What Lorde does not tell us here is that Gennie did not survive because she committed suicide at age sixteen after experiencing repeated sexual abuse by her father (or so it is implied) (Zami 94-101). Lorde herself was raped as a pre-pubescent, and the scene in which she recounts this episode is conflated with her childhood inability to understand the way in which her body worked largely because the medical books she reads make the female body inaccessible and mystified (Zami 75). This moment is echoed later in The Cancer Journals, when Lorde returns home from the hospital, and makes "love to [her]self, endlessly and repetitively, until it was no longer tentative" (Journals 49), an image which is repeated throughout the journals: "I would love myself one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself" (Journals 44). Interestingly, Lorde's need to "reclaim" her body seems at least partially a reaction to the sensation of undesired penetration she feels at the hands of the medical establishment. With liver cancer, Lorde chooses alternative therapies, and images of resistance toward being "cut open" prevail: "When I told [the surgeon] I was having second thoughts about a liver biopsy, he glanced at my charts. Racism and Sexism joined hands across his table.... "Well, you look like an intelligent girl,' he said, staring at my one breast all the time he was speaking" (Light 113). As she muses in The Cancer Journals.

    women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how
they
   look and feel to others.... I must consider what my body means to
me....
   The rape victim is accused of enticing the rapist. The battered wife
is
   accused of having angered her husband. A mastectomy is not a guilty
act
   that must be hidden. (65) 

The same structures which objectify her and devalue her, the same structures which raped and killed her friend Gennie ("Racism and Sexism joining hands"), then, are the same structures surrounding her experience with cancer. These are in fact the "battles" that give birth to Lorde as a "warrior." Yet when cancer itself which, as I have shown, is conflated with her body--is portrayed as "the face and shape of [her] most implacable enemies" (Light 133), what then? What to do when one's own body is invading itself? Lorde understands that this myth of "will power" is "seductive but also very dangerous" (Light 75); it is "propaganda" (Journals 50) that her mind can overcome her body's limitations after surgery. For when does doing what women are expected to do best--depriving their bodies, controlling their bodies--become pathological? I do not feel hunger. My mind can work though this pain. I will not die a coward. These impulses trap us in a binary; we are either the victors or the defeated, either the survivors or the victims. It is this kind of binaristic impulse which Lorde expressly worked against throughout her life.

Lorde notoriously referred to herself as some combination of the terms black, lesbian, feminist, poet, mother, cancer survivor, and warrior, among others. As she explained in countless interviews, "... there's always going to be some group or some person who wants you to talk from only one particular perspective. That's very destructive.... [I]t's just such a terrible injustice to all the other pieces of yourself" (Savren and Robinson 82). Or as Brenda Carr explains, "when a black lesbian woman like Lorde writes from her complex subject positioning, she cannot separate the strands of gender, race, and sexual orientation, except in a kind of dance, where one element temporarily shifts to the foreground, as the other fades to the rearground of inscription." Lorde's experiences with breast cancer are no less woven together in these multiple threads, and she viewed the experience as a testament to the strength of her "myriad selves" (Journals 11). The problem with the rhetoric of warfare, then, is that it allows her only two options, both of which may seem appropriate at certain times but neither of which embody the multiplicities inherent in the experience of illness. Attempting to come to a decision regarding mastectomy, Lorde narrates that "all the time as a background of pain and terror and disbelief, a thin high voice was screaming that none of this was true, it was all a bad dream that would go away if I became totally inert. Another part of me flew like a big bird to the ceiling of whatever place I was in, observing my actions and providing a running commentary, complete with suggestions of factors forgotten, new possibilities of movement, and ribald remarks. I felt as if I was always listening to a concert of voices from inside myself, all with something slightly different to say, all of which were quite insistent and none of which would let me rest" (Journals 31). It is certainly possible that one of these voices is that of the warrior, but notably, Lorde does not identify it as such. What is important here is not any one voice, but the "concert," the conglomerate that helps her process the experience in all its nuances. Later, when Lorde angrily reflects on her experience with the nurse who tells her she is bad for "morale" and insists "I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim" (Journals 60), she reveals the fundamental insufficiencies of the binaries of warfare to help process the immeasurable realities of the illness. If Audre Lorde is a "heterogeneous identity" (Morris 168), then Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer calls for a metaphor that allows a similar heterogeneity of subject positions.

This need for alternative vocabularies, steeped as it is in Lorde's belief that it is Western, masculinist impulses that teach us to reduce ourselves to binaries (Sister), mirrors current discourse surrounding the problem of articulating women's sexuality and lesbian desire. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, "There is a manifest inadequacy of erotic language to represent women's sexual organs, sexual pleasures, and sexual practices.... The very terms for sex, pleasure, desire--'fucking,' 'screwing,' 'coming,' 'orgasm,' and so on--are most appropriate for and are derived from men's experience of sexuality" ("Queer Theory" 225). Grosz's point is indeed highlighted by most visual representations of sex. To return to the L word, for example, the sex portrayed is predominately top/bottom, missionary-style thrusting with very few references to hands, tongues, and/or sex toys. Also, as Linda Williams writes, often even in female-centered and/or lesbian pornography "the cinematic look at the woman is structured from the perspective of the phallus" (247). It may seem a bit of a leap to bring pornography into the discussion, seeing as Lorde denounced both pornography and sado-masochistic play as "the institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships" (Light 14). Yet I think if the idea that sex as "doing what comes naturally" is a conceit of pornography--as long as the "natural" has a clearly defined "top" and "bottom"--then war as what the body does naturally is a similarly embedded construction. For what is the language of warfare but an institutionalized--not to mention masculinized--celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships?

Let me return here to Lorde's assertion that it is "the love of women" from which she derives strength after her biopsy and throughout her first-year post-mastectomy. Lorde's emphasis in The Cancer Journals is on the ways in which she is in fact "a corporate effort, the love and care of so many women having been invested in [her] with such open-heartedness" (30). Recurring throughout the text are images of supportive women, from the abovementioned friend who washes her hair to the ghost of an old lover who had also undergone a mastectomy (Journals 35), to the "network" of friends who supply everything from blankets in the cold hospital to research on alternative medicines to "outrageously rich and sinfully delicious" cakes (Journals 29). Lorde writes: "... there was a tremendous amount of love and support flowing into me from the women around me, and it felt like being bathed in a continuous tide of positive energies.... It is the sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself" (Journals 39). Lorde composed The Cancer Journals to translate this personal experience into the public--or political--precisely that it might be converted into strength for other women and extend her community outward, a goal shared by the "larger tapestry" of her work (Journals 17). Zami, for instance, reveals the way in which Lorde is composed of other women--"Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me.... I live with each of them as a piece of me" (255-56)--and her essays and speeches repeatedly emphasize the desire to bridge the separations imposed by a system that instills structures of dominance and subordination within us (Sister 115-16). If we take inspiration from Lorde's belief that "the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of [us] which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships" (Sister 123), we must question whether we have internalized a violence that ultimately serves to reinforce the systems we oppose, a violence that "hold[s] us separate from each other and breed[s] harshness and cruelty where we most need softness and understanding" (Sister 168).

One of the ways in which Lorde calls to attention the dependence of the I on the you, Sarah Chinn argues, is to focus on the erotic sensation of touch: "The skin touches and is touched simultaneously; even when I touch myself, I am both actor and recipient, reminded of the mutuality of human interaction. This sense of the individual as a collection of self-determined feelings that exist to attach, to feel another person, is at the core of Lorde's definition of self ... human identity is a phenomenon of self-with-others, not of atomized individuals existing for their own advancement" (195). Taking this a step farther, I would argue that negotiating the borders of a body is itself a contextually defined process: "The body image is as much a function of the subject's psychology and sociohistorical context as of anatomy. The limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical "container," the skin. The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges, and contours are "osmotic"--they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange" (Grosz, Bodies 79). Thus when Lorde expresses that, post-mastectomy, the "breast which was no longer there would hurt as if it were being squeezed in a vise" (Journals 38), she is referring to the common experience in which a surgically removed limb continues to generate sensation in the location where it once was. This phenomenon of the phantom limb demonstrates the flexibility of the body, the ways in which it can exist outside of what we would normally consider its borders (Grosz, Bodies 41). In Merleau-Ponty's words, simply by virtue of the fact that it experiences sensation, the phantom limb cannot simply be written away as absent; it is, rather, "quasi-present" (qtd. in Grosz, Bodies 89).

Visiting the city of Tashkent in Uzbekistan, Lorde experiences a very different kind of "quasi-presence":

    Tashkent is divided into two parts. There's the old part that
survived
   the huge earthquake of 1966, and there's the newer part which is
on the
   outskirts of old Tashkent. It's very new and very modern,
rebuilt in a
   very short time after the earthquake that practically totaled the
area.
   It was rebuilt by labor from all over the Soviet Union. People came
from
   the Ukraine, from Byelo-Russia, from all over, and they rebuilt the
city.
   And there are many different styles of architecture in the new part
of
   town because every group who came built their own type of building.
   (Sister
 23) 

In this town, the borders between past and present, divided as they are along the line of an earthquake, are both clearly demarcated and exist simultaneously. Yet even in cities without such obvious faultlines, these boundaries exist fluidly. As Freud writes in Civilizations and its Discontent: "It is hardly necessary to mention that all these remains of ancient Rome are found woven into the fabric of a great metropolis which has arisen in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. There is assuredly much that is ancient still buried in the soil or under the modern buildings of the town" (Freud 5-6). Thus in some form all iterations of the history of Rome are found within present-day Rome; traces of Rome's history--a ruin, a brick, a speck of dust--co-exist with the city as we experience it today. Freud uses this metaphor of the city to illuminate the archaeology of the unconscious, but renounces this metaphor as quickly as he offers it, claiming it is entirely insufficient to capture the life of the mind. He then proposes we compare the unconscious to the body itself, only to reject this metaphor as well: "The early stages of development are in no sense still extant; they have been absorbed into the later features for which they supplied the material. The embryo cannot be demonstrated in the adult; the thymus gland of childhood is replaced after puberty by connective tissue but no longer exists itself; in the marrow-bone of a grown man I can, it is true, trace the outline of the childish bone-structure, but this latter no longer survives in itself ..." (Freud 7). In asserting that the body cannot serve as an accurate metaphor for the mind, Freud elides what Lorde would call the "erotic," the way by which the body is experienced through the mind, the ways in which the two are in constant negotiation. To be sure, our bodies shift, change and "lengthen" in puberty, in illness, and in body modification of varying forms and levels of voluntarity, but the experiences, fragmentary as they may be, do in fact exist in relation to each other at all times, and this palimpsestic experience implicates both mind and body.

It is telling to me, however, that in Freud's positing of the inadequacy of both city and body to visually represent the experience of mind, he draws a connection between body and city themselves. One can "trace" the borders of the old Rome in the new in much the same way one can "trace" the "outline of the childish bone-structure" in the adult's body. Might we not, then, appropriate the metaphor of bodies as cities, a landscape like a body that is simultaneously interdependent with the mind? This idea of past, present, and future co-existing in the space of a body or city has particular reverberations for cancer narratives like Lorde's if, as Polish biologist Ludwik Fleck suggested, the " 'invading' organism" of illness "had to have been living in our vicinity, symbiotically, long enough to be able to stick to our selves ... a previously minor organism could only rise to prominence within the body's life unit, not invade it" (Martin, "Immunology" 421). Thus rather than a metaphor of opposition and violence, the illness can be traced as always-already existing in one's internal neighborhood, as it were.

Imagining cities as bodies--the opposite of what I am proposing here--is not a new idea. The human body has long been mapped onto the physical construction of the city, as when new discoveries in circulation by William Harvey in 1628 gave way to a form of Enlightenment city planning that appropriated the imagery of "arteries" and "veins" to model traffic systems that ultimately ("naturally") led to the "heart" of the castle (Sennett 264). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point to the original frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan as an illustration of this impulse: "Viewed from a distance the illustration shows the body of the king towering over the earth, but closer one can see that below the king's head the body is composed of hundreds of tiny bodies of the citizens, making up his arms and torso.... The analogy serves ... to reinforce and naturalize the division of social functions. There is only one head, and the various limbs and organs must obey its decisions and commands" (330). Like warfare, then, the imagining of city-as-body has served to legitimize particular forms of hierarchy: there is only one head, and it is the head which is most important. In emphasizing these structures of control, this mapping also serves to institutionalize a dichotomy between mind and body in the form of divisions of labor. Yet if both warfare and city-as-body emphasize domination, it is my assertion that if the imagining was flipped on that head, if we understood our bodies as cities in themselves--with all the multiplicities that implies--the hierarchy would become destabilized. For, as I will discuss, while the city-as-body emphasizes the "linear power [and] institutional dehumanization" (Sister 39) Lorde strove to expose and subvert, the city as a dynamic space has historically had the potential to serve as a bridge where disruptive connections could be formed between traditionally disenfranchised peoples. Cities are, of course, found within societies, with all the problems that implies. Yet I hope to demonstrate here how the peculiar composition of the city as testament to both structural oppression and radical possibility makes it a much more functional metaphor than the militarized notions of the body we have internalized.

If the metaphor of body-as-city is distinct from that of city-as-body, it is also distinguished from body-as-landscape, a metaphor that seems to predate the modern notion of the nation-state and exists, in different forms, in both "Western" and "non-Western" cultures. The Chewa peasantry of Malawi, for example, continue to construct an imagery of the body that is mapped onto the way they experience their landscape. They express this in "anamkhungwi, a discourse of the body ... based on extensive exploitation of ecological and cosmological metaphors: the human form necessarily imitates the patterns of the world it occupies and these, in turn, are modeled on the human form" (Kaspin 567). As I mentioned earlier, traditional Chinese medicine imagines the body as a landscape composed of "meridians" that correspond to organic elements (water, wood, etc.); the practitioner of TCM has been depicted as the "gardener" to the Western doctor's "mechanic" (Millburn 146). Yet I would posit that turning away from warfare to one of landscape, or earth, would be to turn from one traditionally gendered metaphor to another. Plainly stated, within the Western ideologies in which Lorde is writing, "mother" earth has historically been imagined as a passive female form, ripe for the conquest by active males who can exert dominion upon it. Further, women have long been associated with the earth insofar as they, by virtue of their ability to bear children, have been deemed more bodily or natural than men; they are associated with the "unreason" of the body rather than of the mind (Chodorow; Martin, Woman; Rich). In suggesting the city as a new metaphor for the body, I hope to suggest a tangible entity like a body that at once testifies to the "life of the mind" implicit in its construction.

What if the landscape of my body could be imagined as streets and buildings that could be built and rebuilt; if my cells, both "healthy" and "mutated," were the people who helped to build such structures, people who perhaps have not chosen to live together, but for the most part need to coexist harmoniously, rather than "citizens" and "foreigners" who needed to eradicate each other? Could my body consist of neighborhoods, could my arteries be subways? If the boundary between outside and inside, citizen and foreigner, city and body, were collapsed, what would happen? I cannot begin to present all the implications for how a shift in metaphor might ultimately play out and all the vocabularies which might be built upon it. Nor do I know in advance what these vocabularies might look like. What is most appealing about this metaphor, I would suggest, is its multiplicities, its very uncontained nature. I would, however, like to suggest a foundation, or skeleton of sorts, on which to build this vocabulary.

Within the bedrock of this metaphor lies the fact that the city is constructed; as a geography it never exists without a particular amount of human intervention. It does not pre-date human existence, like the land upon which it is built. It is not a preinscribed surface; it comes to being from particular histories in which humans are always-already implicated. Lorde's description of Tashkent--"it's like it remains standing on human will" and "it's almost a memorial to what can be done when a large group of people work together" (Sister 23)--is particularly focused on this aspect. In this imagining the city is, for Lorde, a "mythic representation for that socialism which does not yet exist" (Sister 13). While this socialism may as yet be mythical, however, its potential is embodied in the collectivity of the city. What is appealing about it is that it is a testament to the human element embedded within: the bodies themselves that produced the city, continuously reinvent the city, and which in fact compose the city.

Though the city may thus be distinguished from landscape by virtue of the human element which composes it, the city is not locked into a binary system with the country, or the earth itself. As Raymond Williams has persuasively shown, rather, the city has in fact "developed as an aspect of the agricultural order itself" (48). The two exist in constant negotiation, continuously reinscribing each other. This is not simply a relationship of domination, but of symbiosis. The city is built in particular locations precisely because of the complex interplay of the structure of the landscape itself (mountains, rivers, oceans) and the needs and desires of people. The "needs and desires" of the people, of course, are themselves fluid concepts, and as those needs and desires change, so does the physical shape of the city itself. New buildings are built, old buildings are demolished, older buildings given "historical" status and restored. Complex train and bus systems are imagined to move people around as need be. "Green" spaces are built, or protected, or developed as demanded by particular portions of the body politic. But cities are not necessarily pleasant, utopic spaces, and neither are our bodies always experienced as such. If the post-industrial decay and depopulation at play in cities such as Leipzig or Manchester are not the prettiest metaphors, neither are they the least fecund. Rather than imagining a "diseased" body as a body at war, a body of utter destruction, one might imagine a body of cycles, of mutability, and further, a body with a population attempting to creatively revitalize, as with the "Shrinking Cities" campaign, a group of artists, architects, and academics from various disciplines seeking to both investigate and create art out of six depopulating cities (Oswalt, Alsop, and Baur). The city is ultimately never stagnant, but is always in some process of inventing itself (and that invention does not, as I will detail later, always conform to the needs and desires of the ruling classes). Would this metaphor not serve Lorde's desire to make the meaning of her scar--to "attach" to the landscape of her body whatever meaning she needs (Lorde, Journals 77)--more so than imposing the image of a battlefield on it?

For no less a technique of production than a city, the body is not a passive, inert biological entity but one actively experienced through wide matrices of structures. However, if it does not exist as a pre-inscribed surface, it is also never marked solely from without; the various ways in which we inscribe our bodies are "commonly undertaken voluntarily and usually require the active compliance of the subject" (Grosz, Bodies 143). These inscriptions may be derived from socially constructed ideals that require particular forms of body modification (exercise, breast augmentation, face lifts, hair dye) to those alterations considered "subversive" in some way (tattooing, body piercing, scarification, flesh-hanging etc.). Though the latter can be implicated in a particular, consumer-driven capitalist system which allows for such "subversion," as Victoria Pitts writes, "When women engage in anomalous body projects, meanings can be produced outside of what is functional, efficient, or otherwise fruitful for the social order. The circulation of norms can be, at least temporarily, interrupted, so that the ordinary relations of power over women's bodies, including those governing beauty, consumption, health and mental health, are challenged. The minute partial, marginal, 'inner' histories of women's bodies can be made visible and inserted into the flow of information, such that the dominant ideologies are forced to confront their subjugated knowledges" (194). Isn't this what Lorde desires when she refuses to wear a prosthesis post-mastectomy?

In fact, one of Lorde's primary goals in The Cancer Journals is to insist upon speaking the reality of her body: that is, she refuses to wear a prosthetic breast because she believes that doing so polices women from forming valuable (but potentially disruptive) connections based on their experiences. Lorde desires to make cancer visible within the body politic. The problem, then, with metaphors of the body-as-nation and, by extension, of the sick body as body-at-war--beyond, of course, the naturalization of both patriarchy and violence--is that such metaphors move away from the body as a physical site, and towards imagining the body as bureaucracy of some kind. Plainly stated, one might imagine the Head-of-State as symbol of the nation, but the workings of nation itself become blurry; the nation is, in Althusserian terms, superstructure, and while it must rest on the (economic) base that comprises much of its citizens' lived experience, it is also a representation, ideology The concept of a nation itself is imagined, something that comes to being discursively--"not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live" (Althusser 111).

The city, meanwhile, like the body, can be touched, tasted, smelled, felt. Again, this is not to say that the city itself is not embedded within the superstructure of a society. Cities represent the society in which they are found and, as such, are most often implicated in a capitalist system (as are, I might hasten to add, most of our bodies). The difference between the power structuring a city and the power structuring a nation, however, is that the citizens of said city can in many ways experience such power tangibly. The inequalities of the city are present, visible, and accessible to comprehension in the way the concept of a nation is not. This is, for example, the reason why Lorde chooses to raise her children in New York City: it may sometimes be "onerous" but it is also "vital," a wellspring of creativity despite its being embedded in the problems of the United States (Chawla 118-19). While taking care to recognize the unique difficulties of underprivileged urban communities, particularly those of color, one must also take care not to slip into certain stereotypes about these being a site of violence detached from the larger structural problems of the societies in which they exist. In other words, as home to some of the largest and dynamic "minority" communities, cities in the West have a long history of dynamic collectivity and agency for these groups and therefore remain sites of radical possibility. Lorde herself is a prime example of this, as both activist and teacher in an inner-city public university.

Further, while one may choose to ignore the other classes (and races, where applicable) that populate our cities, one can very rarely avoid seeing them. And when one is forced to see, to work with, to move with groups of people, to be an agent among other agents, the city can behave in ways that cannot always be anticipated by those in power--and as such, embodies a form of possibility that is potentially resistant to those structures of power. In describing her post-mastectomy recovery, Lorde writes: "I felt Beth Israel Hospital wrapped in a web of woman love and strong wishes of faith and hope ... and it made self-healing more possible, knowing that I was not alone." Lorde's project, as I have shown, is to extend this personal experience--that of being "a corporate effort" of her friends and family--into the political (Journals 29-30). Consider again her desire for women with mastectomies to be visible to each other and thus promote awareness that this is a collective experience: she wishes to "share" her "strength" in surviving cancer so that women as a group can "translate the silence surrounding breast cancer in language and action against this scourge" (Journals 61). If Lorde seeks a metaphor that embodies that need for a community, war is insufficient, specifically because the only relationship available there is by definition one of violence and opposition. Even with those fighting "on her side," the warrior forms relationships actuated on aggression. The metaphor of a city, on the other hand, lends itself to a plethora of relationships, some of which may well be oppositional, but many of which are more often predicated on a sort of desire to inhabit the same space in a way that is mutually beneficial to all involved.

In other words, the metaphor of the city may account for the types of "connection ... so feared by a patriarchal world" (Sister 111) in the way war, institutionalized as it generally is, does not. It is, in fact, the inevitably of this kind of contact in cities that has been construed as a threat to the status quo: the "multiracial waterfront" of New York, for example, was historically feared by the elite precisely because "the cooperative nature of the work in the port" could create "dangerous insurrectionary connections" (Linebaugh and Rediker 206). This impulse goes back much further than that; anthropological and archaeological research has suggested that the ballcourts located in Mesoamerican cities often hosted sponsored feasting which served as a "resolution" of the "unpredictability" of the ballgame by the ruling elite (Fox et al. 494-95). And yet the need for this "resolution" belies the destabilization possible in the city public: if the construction of ballcourts and causeways were attempts by the elite to integrate the city population then the simultaneous appearance of ancestral shrines can be interpreted as a form of "localized resistance" to this "centralization of authority" (Fox et al. 496). In more recent memory, projects such as Frederick Law Olmsted's Belle Isle in Detroit (or New York's Central Park), while being the self-defined "crown jewel" of Detroit, was also, as an unpredictable contact zone for all classes, a real source of anxiety for those whose "crown" it represented (Rybczynski). Thus even in its most official narratives and imperial visions, the city contains the possibility to escape itself.

Beyond the intra-class contact which historically allowed for certain forms of rebellion, the city also allows an inter-class form of contact which, as Samuel Delany argues in his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the capitalist system otherwise works to dismantle, continuously eroding the "social practices through which interclass communication takes place" so that new "institutions" can be "conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed" (111). This kind of randomized, inter-class contact is crucial and "results in everything from basic intra-neighborhood 'pleasantness' to heroic neighborly assistance in times of catastrophe" but most significantly are "the site and origin of a good many of what can later be seen as life opportunities," in all senses of the word--including economic, political, and sexual (156). These are, of course, the same bridges that Lorde hopes to enact through her writing. To bring this back to the metaphor of the body by mapping such contacts onto cells: if I believe that my body is engaged in contact rather than combat, I might be getting a step closer to the nurturance which Lorde promotes. Such a shift might well be crucial in allowing us to bridge the chasm between an ill body and its perceived war with the mind.

This mind-body dichotomy is not the only binary the city destabilizes. Part of the trouble with the metaphor of nation and warfare is that it is clearly embedded in an oppositional space: self and enemy, citizen and foreigner. Meanwhile, the body in and of itself is not oppositional. Of course one can conceive of a clear binary between self and other, but as I hope to have shown thus far, that neither seems to speak to the socially mediated ways in which we experience our bodies, nor does it seem to be the way in which Lorde wishes to conceptualize her body (recall the ways in which her relationships have "tattooed" themselves upon her body). The city testifies to a similar composition: it indelibly marks an individual with the collective, bringing a concrete understanding, in Suketu Mehta's words, that "all the ill-assorted people" of Bombay "walking toward the giant clock on Churchgate ... are me; they are my body and my flesh" (540). This is not to romanticize the city; those fourteen million people of Bombay, many of whom live in extreme conditions of poverty, cannot be romanticized. Yet they can be touched, felt, seen; they are humanized rather than "demonized" the way enemy combatants, by definition, must be (Hedges 21). There is a tangible awareness in cities that we rely on the workings of this mass, that we are interconnected rather than opposed. In much the same way we rely on the interconnectedness not only among all parts of our bodies, but between our bodies and minds. Using the city, a landscape "tattooed" by human creation, as a metaphor for the body might thus serve to disrupt the mind-body split from which Lorde both suffers and desires to escape.

Escaping a strict binary system further opens up the space for the types of contact I outlined above insofar as it allows for a variety of roles beyond warrior or casualty. If one is successful in achieving remission, but cancer ultimately returns, is one then a casualty? Has one then failed as warrior? If the body is a city, the possibilities for how we experience cancer are endless. The energy I draw upon to work through and with illness can derive from a variety of roles, can reflect those "myriad selves" without which I cannot live. This is different, however, from the "flexibility" Emily Martin finds emerging in writings on immunology, a metaphor taken from management science (Flexible). The goal in the body-as-city metaphor is not a Social Darwinist one in which the most "flexible" immune system is hierarchized. Rather, imagining the body as neighborhoods and as communities makes available a much more richly varied environment from which to define "strength," and all iterations are integral.

These iterations, further, can be gendered--or not--as is appropriate. For try as Lorde might to reclaim female warriors such as the Amazons, militarization is still in many senses masculinized--as evidenced here by the fact that, in amputating their breasts, the Amazons construct traditionally male bodies. Part of the way war functions is by devaluing women, whether it be in terms of their work on the homefront, through rape, or through the distinct feminization of (and subsequent sexually charged violence toward) "enemy" men. In pointing out the hypermasculinized face of war, I do not mean to diminish the ways in women have been involved in such conflicts--in combat, as medical support, as distributors of aid, or as challengers of both war itself and these masculinist understandings of it. Secondly, it would be naive to ignore "recent and well-documented instances," in Rosalind Petchesky's words, that "force us to rethink some long-held assumptions about who are the perpetrators and who the victims of sexual abuses and violations of bodily integrity in conflict zones": "U. S. women political leaders, prison commanders, interrogators, and rank-and-file guards who participated in sexual torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; or the Hindu women in Gujarat who goaded men in their communities to rape and mutilate Muslim women; or the Rwandan Hum officials, also women, who ordered such atrocities" (Keynote Address). Ultimately, however, one simply cannot deny that war is popularly thought of as male terrain, and when it serves as a metaphor for the body its gendered nature carries over: "In the tiny world of ... cells we see stereotypically 'male' penetrating killer cells and stereotypically 'female' devouting and cleaning cells" (Martin, "Immunology" 417). The city, on the other hand, always exists of both men and women and has always been built both by men and women in every meaning of the word (Linebaugh and Rediker 47); as Sarah Deutsch explains in her discussion of women's history in Boston: "Middle class and elite white women creating safe space for themselves downtown and building launching pads for lobbying campaigns at the state legislature; black women creating residences, shops, and newspapers; and women workers creating child care and unions--all demonstrate women's active agency in shaping the city" (23). As with its role in the history of communities of color, then, the city is testament to the collaboration and active participation of women in a way that war simply is not.

If the borders of the body are essentially fluid (again, recall our discussion of the phantom limb), then the body is defined as much by what is outside of it as what is contained within it. The city functions in much the same way. Though it may have "official" borders, those borders are continually reimagined in the minds of its citizens in ways that disrupt these official demarcations. The definition of a "neighborhood" rarely conforms to the static, and therefore often obsolete, boundaries the city itself delineates, for example. One need only recognize that while the Statue of Liberty does not exist within New York jurisdiction, few would think of it as "belonging" to New Jersey as concrete example of this fact.

The citizens of a city are equally impossible to encapsulate. Beyond the intra- and inter-class (and interracial, where applicable) contact it promotes, it is also a fundamentally vital, shifting space. The very isolation and anonymity which many decry in the city is the precondition to this heterogeneity. Various bodies move in and out of the city, "documented" and otherwise, and this again rarely conforms to the desires of the ruling class. Gloria Andalzfia, in her seminal Borderlands/La Frontera, writes: "The U.S.-Mexican border es una henda abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country--a border culture" (25). Yet if there is the systemized violence of the bleeding, there is also the unstructured inevitability of the merging. In imaging one's body as such a site, one can visualize the kind of space that deviates from the official narratives war produces. In other words, one might animate the gap between victor and defeated/healthy and diseased to allow for some third term.

I do not mean to suggest that there are not a number of difficulties inherent in imagining our bodies as cities. As I have already suggested, the city is implicated in particular oppressions, though the city itself also predates capitalism and can be found in both "Western" and "non-Western" regions. Unfortunate as it may be, "no text, not even a 'feminist' text can be immune" to the charge that it exists within a patriarchal structure "insofar as the very categories, concepts, and methodologies for both phallocentrism and its critique are derived from our received history of texts and knowledges" (Grosz, Bodies 164; italics added). Nor can one entirely internalize the body-as-city metaphor without recognizing that the cities which Lorde attributes to "standing on human will" were also built on the will of those who relied on an extreme type of brutality, or that they often exist within a history of colonial violence. Yet because they are something built by human hands in a creative rather than destructive way (though such creation may well have been coerced in all of the most terroristic meanings of the word), the city as metaphor contains a possibility for self-invention much more in line with Lorde's project than that of warfare. The fact remains that these cities were built by those who would traditionally be left out of "official" histories, and in that way embody an alternative discourse. There is a measure of agency that can be gained in saying that people built a city in a way in which people dying in battle cannot; one produces an embodiment of promise, whereas the other reproduces a particular superstructure that functions only ideologically.

This question of agency leads to another conceptual difficulty in the body-as-city-metaphor: that of the public qualities of the city. When one thinks of cities, one thinks of apartment buildings with no great measure of privacy, of bodies crammed into transportation systems, of people forced to constantly be in contact. What space does the city allow for private selves? Yet though we experience our bodies singularly, and one might argue privately, I would counter that the body is always-already performative; it is both interior and exterior. The dispersed notion of the city-as-body can testify to the fragmentary ways in which we experience our bodies, the ways this experience is mediated by our own histories, our sociohistorical contexts, and, indeed, each other. The imagining of body-as-city allows an appropriate flexibility for deconstructing the binary between inside and outside, allowing us to imagine ourselves as inhabiting both. Like the genre of the published journal, it testifies to the ways in which our identities are not "private," but rely on their being spoken to others; bodies, like cities, are "the condition and context through which" we are able to have relationships (Grosz, Bodies 86). Body-as-city thus speaks to the kind of creative self-invention that at once exists within particular structures but simultaneously contains the possibility of resistance to it. It merges the political and the personal rather than dichotomizes them. It allows for a multitude of selves rather than a "whole" self: it gives voice to that "concert of voices" Lorde houses inside. And if one imagines oneself as a communal space in and of oneself, one naturalizes the "bridges" Lorde hopes to both construct with and leave for others. If we are composed of archaeologies of each other, we carry within us the potential for new imaginings of the body and self rather than imaginings that indoctrinate and stagnate us in the systems of opposition that oppress and separate us. Our agency is then constructed not through our subordination of others, but each other. We might then learn to "beat" cancer without a fist.

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Note

(1.) It is important to note that I do not intend my scope here to extend to a discussion about (or a judgment of) the appropriateness of individualized responses to the experience of disease. Rather, I utilize a specific text as a catalyst toward questioning the narratives or language that we as a society present to those experiencing disease.