절제(切除)된 정체성: 오드르 로드(Audre Lorde)의 『암일지』(The Cancer Journals)에 나타난 유방절제와 여성의 정체성

Abstract

This paper explores questions of changed identity and reconstruction of "I" that incorporates Audre Lorde's experience and mastectomy by examining her collection of journal entries and essays in The Cancer Journals which reveal her process of coping with breast cancer and mastectomy. Although Lorde, a breast cancer patient, lost her right breast for cancer treatment, she redefines her position as one-breasted woman, one of the power rather than weakness and shame. For Lorde, the medical system relegates the breast cancer patients to the position of passive medical objects rather than enabling them to define their own illness experiences and to become the subjects of their own stories of illness. Rather than passively submitting to the dominant social view on women who have undergone mastectomy, she determined to break the verbal silence about women's experiences of breast cancer through her writing and to address the visual silence by refusing to hide her body. After her mastectomy, Lorde's healing process, centered on integrating her new physical shape and the emotions generated by this change into her everyday life, is in synchronization with her writing process in the form of autopathography. Lorde's new sense of self is mirrored in the figure of the amazon warrior, which highlights the central concerns for Lorde in her process of reconstructing an identity. The Cancer Journals, as a political act, intends to effect change on both personal and social levels. On an individual level, Lorde uses her writing to help her integrate her changed body, thought and emotions into her everyday life, an act that is ideologically opposed to the message she receives from the medical and cancer establishments. On a social level, her writing and her refusal to wear a prosthesis make Lorde socially visible as a post-mastectomy woman, thereby challenging the dominant cultural construction of breast cancer and mastectomy as a disease and a condition that women should endure in silence and shame. The Cancer Journals provides women with a paradigm for facing breast cancer and coping with it openly rather than in isolation and silence and for synthesizing the physical, emotional, psychological and social components of illness into their lives.