Revisiting Cancer: The Politics of Discrimination and Disguise in Audre Lordes’ works.

Abstract

Breast cancer is the disease which conquers the diseased body without warning, savagely eating into the system silently, spreading across vital organs and rupturing the body’s progress and functions. If the diseased is prudent enough or rather fortunate to detect the growth which is slowly and silently seeping into the body early intervention might help. Detection is ‘fortunately’ just the beginning of this battle followed by mastectomy, the agony of chemotherapy and radiation and the perpetual fear of recurrence and death. This paper attempts to look into Audre Lorde’s works as she part of her other ‘selves’ detects the disease, understands the diseased, the treatment creates questions on histories, identities and concept of the secular, unity and peace are correlative to erotic and sisterhood. The battles are on-going and the cancers are spreading. The only way to understand this disease in perspective is to think deep, speak loud and keep questioning.