Tekhne of reconstruction: breast cancer, norms, and fleshy rearrangements

Authors

Nadine Ehlers, University of WollongongFollow

RIS ID

68990

Publication Details

Ehlers, N. 2012, 'Tekhnē of reconstruction: breast cancer, norms, and fleshy rearrangements', Social Semiotics, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 121-141.

Abstract

This essay is an engagement with and a rejoinder to Audre Lorde’s framing of prosthetics and breast reconstruction in her seminal The Cancer Journals. Given that, as Susan Merrill Squier has argued, human life is increasingly defined and understood in terms of discourses and possibilities for the ‘‘instrumental deployment of resources for bodily renewal,’’ this essay explores how the body/ materiality might be understood in relation to the tekhne (the technologies, techniques, and craft) of reconstruction three decades after Lorde’s account.