Reproductive cancer: female autonomy and border crossing in medical discourse and fiction

Abstract

Using three contemporary Irish novels: Down By the River and The Light of Evening by Edna O'Brien and My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain as well as Irish Medical Journal, I suggest that representations of female cancers are images of female pathology that reify and question disease as limitation of autonomy. Tracing the image of reproductive cancers through parts of the Irish cultural artifacts displays how both the fiction and Irish medical discourse attend disproportionately to female reproductive cancers. The texts construct female bodies as sites of pathology through textual representations of reproductive cancer and build upon Irish metaphors of landscape as female, which conceptualize women's (immobile, permeable) bodies as the site of invasion. Thus, fiction and health genres construct (and restrict) gender autonomy through two versions of border control: movement across body borders and movement across spatial, especially geopolitical, borders.