Gender and Sexuality Studies

Abstract

How is a breastless site more rather than less? Paul Preciado argues that “A sexual organ is any organ (inorganic or organic) that has the capacity to channel the potentia gaudendi through a nervous system connecting a living body to its exteriority or by producing a network of bodies and machines” (Preciado 2018, 12). This potential goes beyond the merely legible. In my stage three breast cancer, glitched cells colonized my body, rendering my left breast a cratered moonscape, a haunting absence. It glitched my time, creating what I considered a temporary disruption. It settled me into academic work on breast cancer as distinct from my own body; it was the work of the mind, a performance of competency. The power of “the glitch” lies in its “incessant cutting and stitching, breaking and healing” (Russell 2020, Chapter 5). Healing, no longer an endpoint, but “always on the move” (Russell 2020, Chapter 2), enfolded bodies, both mine and those in the texts I read in a movement of discovery with new anti-diagnostics and prognoses as potentia. Breast cancer becomes the channel for networking with stories of power gender as glitch: in Marvel’s Jane Foster/Thor character (see Weibe and Woodman)and in trans imaginaries like Bishak Som’s Apsara Engine. A superhero glitched with breast cancer and a trans graphic artist glitching bodies and lived-in spaces. Breast cancer has opened me to consider how the glitched, in breast cancer and queer bodies, creates Braidotti’s potestas and potentia through the disruptive power of glitching. Whereas breast cancer created a glitch in time, I could now understand my body affected by it as empowered to glitch while being glitched. Breast cancer has impacted not just what I research, but how I do it. Gender is glitched by breast cancer to create potential avenues of exploration; it opens texts to consider gender as power by building upon Foucault and Butler as seen through Russell, Preciado and Braidotti.

This talk will focus on excerpts from the chapter in the following work:

(BC) Breast Cancer in the Academy: Critical Identities, Connective Agencies, and Pedagogies of Change (COLLECTIVE WORK), edited by Wendy K.Z. Anderson and Tehmina Pirzada (EDITOR), under advance contract with Rutgers University Press.

Biography

Dorothy Woodman has a PHD in English Literature and is a Full Lecturer at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. She has publications in medical narratives and body politics topics, utilizing intersectional, queer, and feminist theories. Her major publication, The Cancer Plot: Terminal Immortality in Marvel’s Moral Universe (U of Alberta P, 2023), is a co-authored work with Reginald Weibe (Concordia University in Edmonton),