Verbal and Visual Rhetorics of Cancer: Defying Silence in Margaret Edson, Audre Lorde and Jo Spence’s Works

Authors

Catalina Florina Florescu

Abstract

In this essay I offer some powerful verbal and visual examples of the rhetorics of cancer in an attempt to bring to our attention the experiences and reflections of those who felt more like medical cases than persons-patients while facing and eventually dying because of cancer. My essay is a critical “travelogue” through the pain of the other, more specifically as it is presented in Margaret Edson’s play Wit (2000), Audre Lorde’s memoir The Cancer Journals (1992), and Jo Spence verbal and visual memoirs Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography (1988) and Cultural Snipping: The Art of Transgression (1995).

Author Biography

Catalina-Florina Florescu is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. In 2006 she won a PRF grant for her proposal, The Acquisition of the Body’s Language(s): An Interdisciplinary Study in Literature, Art, and Bioethics. She is now writing her dissertation, Transacting Sites of the Liminal Bodily Spaces to be defended in June, 2007.

Recommended Citation

Florescu, Catalina Florina (2006) "Verbal and Visual Rhetorics of Cancer: Defying Silence in Margaret Edson, Audre Lorde and Jo Spence’s Works," Journal of International Women's Studies: Vol. 8: Iss. 1, Article 20.
Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol8/iss1/20