The Iconicity of the Breast: (En)Gendering Material Meaning After Mastectomy

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 03. Material Culture Network

Abstract

This paper draws from female-identified breast cancer survivors’ accounts of life before, during and after their mastectomy to examine how the aesthetic rooting of binary gender codes to the material shape of a person’s chest hyperbolizes the putative dimorphism of the sexes along gender lines, resulting in an iconization of masculine (flat/oblique) and feminine (full/mounded) aesthetic surfaces which, arousing feelings of the beautiful and sublime, not only informs social understandings of femininity and masculinity but also perceptions of gender wellness. In drawing critical attention to the aesthetic, material dimension of meaning-making, I aim to convey how bodily figuration makes the experiential, sensuous apprehension of conventional gender codes possible. By wit of this conveyance, I endeavor to show how structures of feeling and bodily sensation braid together to make transgressive bodies matter in conventionally as well as unconventionally gendered ways. Furthermore, I show that an iconic part of the body, the breast, is not a material object as such, but an embodied materiality whose immaterial meaning reaches beyond the corporeal borders of the body, and its sundry doings, to make contact with the affective dimension of iconicity. As a result of its affective connection to iconic consciousness, a person’s gender is, I argue, neither assumed nor evacuated by a body; that is, not entirely, and not by the material body alone.

Author

• Anne Marie Champagne, Yale University