Kristy Crawley

Title: Professor

University: Forsyth Technical Community College

Description of Work:

Underscoring breast cancer survivorship’s harmful connection to reconstruction, Shelley Cobb and Susan Starr warn that “. . . the [makeover] metaphor insidiously constructs contemporary women’s experience of breast cancer, making it about positive personal transformation, which assumes the requisite bodily refashioning, and designates reconstructive surgery as a signifier of survivorship (98). Thus, Cobb and Starr conclude that “. . . the makeover metaphor has infiltrated breast cancer culture, limiting women’s experience of the disease to only one possible narrative, overshadowing those women who do not fulfill the role of the idealized survivor from the public image of breast cancer . . .” (98). With reconstruction appearing to be the primary pathway to positive personal transformation, the dominant narrative eclipses survivors’ wide spectrum of experiences, specifically silencing those who deviate from the narrative’s reconstructive surgical path.

Considering reconstruction’s deep ties to survivorship and normality, how do survivors disrupt the dominant narrative and present their differing conceptions of survivorship and normality? To answer this question, I argue that breast cancer survivors deviating from reconstruction paths form subaltern counterpublics in online spaces to disrupt the dominant makeover narrative and create room for alternative survivorship narratives. I refer to the subaltern counterpublic as Going Flat, a diverse group of breast cancer survivors choosing not to reconstruct. Nancy Fraser defines subaltern counterpublics as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interest, and needs” (123).