Beauty and the Breast: Mastectomy, Materiality and the Iconicity of Gender Identity

• In Event: 4323 - Culture and Identity

Abstract

In this paper I illustrate three pathways by which changes to the body and embodied gender identity take place and become materially iconicized: the visual, the sensual, and the discursive. Drawing on biographical interviews with breast cancer survivors, I show how materiality figures and is figured by the dialectic of the beautiful and the sublime along each of these pathways such that it is rendered as (1) a form that socially reconstructs the iconicity of the breast, (2) a sense that restores the iconicity of the breast’s discursive depths, and/or (3) a discourse that rearticulates the iconicity of the breast. My research builds upon previous studies that examine the relationship between materiality and meaning, body and embodiment, and gender signification. While many of these studies shed light on how the social contingencies of material integrity and embodied performance can obfuscate or illuminate the polysemy of gender in social life, my research starts with but moves beyond the witnessable interactions of social life to chart individual processes by which iconically structured meanings of gender “interact with bodies and identities in the production of new embodied selves” (Shapiro 2010:181). In doing so, I reveal how the iconicity of the breast, enlivened at both the level of individual experience and social life, constitutes a fecund reservoir of meaning structures that can potentially spur cultural change. For these structures not only have the potential to make transgressive bodies comprehensible and thus citable, they also have the potential to render them pleasurable and thus inhabitable.

Author

• Anne Marie Champagne, Yale University