Karen Strassler

KAREN STRASSLER, City University of New York, Queens College, Queens, New York, was awarded a grant in October 2021 to aid research on “Image-Work and the Visual Politics of Breast Cancer.” Breast cancer strikes one in eight women in the United States, kills Black women at a higher rate than white women, and is linked to toxicity in our food and environment. This research project examined how people with breast cancer use, make, and circulate images to address the embodied experience of the disease and to intervene in its public visibility. Image-making practices have become integral to the ways people in the contemporary US confront their experiences of breast cancer, including “cancer journey” chronicles shared with family and friends, images posted to social media groups for cancer survivors, private documentation of treatment, posing for professional pre- and post-mastectomy photo shoots, as well as art and explicitly activist images. The research asked: How do people use images to forge new self-envisionings in the wake of treatment? To what extent does their image-work challenge dominant framings of the disease and generate new ways of seeing breast cancer? Whether explicitly or implicitly, images put into circulation by people with breast cancer challenge sanitized and narrowly biomedical framings of the disease, question the capitalist, sexist, and racist underpinnings of treatment, and make BIPOC, queer, male, and young people with breast cancer visible.