While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer's book looks ...specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction.
Fractured borders DeShazer, Mary K
2005., 20100205, 2005, c2005.
eBook
Women have been writing about cancer for decades, but since the early 1990s, the body of literature on cancer has increased exponentially as growing numbers of women face the searing realities of the ...disease and give testimony to its ravages and revelations. Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature surveys a wide range of contemporary writing about breast, uterine, and ovarian cancer, including works by Marilyn Hacker, Margaret Edson, Carole Maso, Audre Lorde, Eve Sedgwick, Mahasweta Devi, Lucille Clifton, Alicia Ostriker, Jayne Anne Phillips, Terry Tempest Williams, and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. DeShazer's readings bring insights from body theory, performance theory, feminist literary criticism, French feminisms, and disability studies to bear on these works, shining new light on a literary subject that is engaging more and more writers.
Photographic representations of women living with or beyond breast cancer have gained prominence in recent decades. Postmillennial visual narratives are both documentary projects and dialogic sites ...of self-construction and reader-viewer witness. After a brief overview of 30 years of breast cancer photography, this essay analyzes a collaborative photo-documentary by Stephanie Byram and Charlee Brodsky,
Knowing Stephanie
(
2003
), and a memorial photographic essay by Brodsky written ten years after Byram’s death, “Remembering Stephanie” (
2014
). The ethics of representing women’s postsurgical bodies and opportunities for reader-viewers to engage in “productive looking” (Kaja Silverman’s concept) are the focal issues under consideration.
Postmillennial photographic narratives that represent women's lived experience of breast cancer and its technologized terrain provide the focus of this essay, which offers a critical analysis of ...Catherine Lord's The Summer of Her Baldness (2004) and Lynn Kohlman's Lynn Front to Back (2005). The essay examines ways in which narrators and audiences construct multiple meanings regarding the somatic and symbolic contours of this disease, and it explores the following questions: What distinctive contributions to readers' and viewers' understandings of women's material and technologized bodies do twenty-first breast cancer photo-narratives offer? How might feminist theories of illness, autobiography, and embodiment and postmodern constructions of narrative subjectivity enhance analysis and interpretation of breast cancer's textual and visual representations? What discursive tropes and personae, visual and rhetorical strategies, ethical and aesthetic debates, and opportunities for discursive resistance and audience witness do these narratives engage?
Leibovitz's A Photographer's Life, both the 2006 book and the traveling exhibition housed from October 2008 to February 2009 at the National Portrait Gallery in London and more recently shown in ...Berlin, Madrid, and Vienna, consists of large, airbrushed, highly stylized, lushly colored photos of celebrities that have earned her the designation "American master" and a series of mostly small, informal black and white photos of her parents, children, siblings, friends, and lover.7 Of the 341 images contained in the book, which Leibovitz calls "a memoir in photographs," more than two-thirds are personal, and approximately a hundred of these depict Sontag.8 In many photos she appears as a traveler reflecting upon an exotic landscape, an artist at work either writing or directing theatre, a woman engaged in conversation with friends or gazing at her lover's newborn child, or a domestic partner relaxing in a shared and sometimes eroticized space, most often bath or bed.
While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer's book looks ...specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction.
Sisters in Arms DeShazer, Mary K
Writing the Woman Artist,
11/2016
Book Chapter
The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let ...those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning.
Monique Wittig,Les Guérillères
We are Black people living in a time when the consciousness of our intended slaughter is all around us. People of Color are increasingly expendable, our government’s policy both
Burkholderia pseudomallei
, the gram-negative bacterium that causes melioidosis, is notoriously difficult to treat with antibiotics. A significant effort has focused on identifying protective vaccine ...strategies to prevent melioidosis. However, when used as individual medical countermeasures both antibiotic treatments (therapeutics or post-exposure prophylaxes) and experimental vaccine strategies remain partially protective. Here we demonstrate that when used in combination, current vaccine strategies (recombinant protein subunits AhpC and/or Hcp1 plus capsular polysaccharide conjugated to CRM197 or the live attenuated vaccine strain
B. pseudomallei
668 Δ
ilvI
) and co-trimoxazole regimens can result in near uniform protection in a mouse model of melioidosis due to apparent synergy associated with distinct medical countermeasures. Our results demonstrated significant improvement when examining several suboptimal antibiotic regimens (e.g., 7-day antibiotic course started early after infection or 21-day antibiotic course with delayed initiation). Importantly, this combinatorial strategy worked similarly when either protein subunit or live attenuated vaccines were evaluated. Layered and integrated medical countermeasures will provide novel treatment options for melioidosis as well as diseases caused by other pathogens that are refractory to individual strategies, particularly in the case of engineered, emerging, or re-emerging bacterial biothreat agents.
Burkholderia pseudomallei
and the closely related species,
Burkholderia mallei
, produce similar multifaceted diseases which range from rapidly fatal to protracted and chronic, and are a major cause ...of mortality in endemic regions. Besides causing natural infections, both microbes are Tier 1 potential biothreat agents. Antibiotic treatment is prolonged with variable results, hence effective vaccines are urgently needed. The purpose of our studies was to compare candidate vaccines that target both melioidosis and glanders to identify the most efficacious one(s) and define residual requirements for their transition to the non-human primate aerosol model. Studies were conducted in the C57BL/6 mouse model to evaluate the humoral and cell-mediated immune response and protective efficacy of three
Burkholderia
vaccine candidates against lethal aerosol challenges with
B. pseudomallei
K96243,
B. pseudomallei
MSHR5855, and
B. mallei
FMH. The recombinant vaccines generated significant immune responses to the vaccine antigens, and the live attenuated vaccine generated a greater immune response to OPS and the whole bacterial cells. Regardless of the candidate vaccine evaluated, the protection of mice was associated with a dampened cytokine response within the lungs after exposure to aerosolized bacteria. Despite being delivered by two different platforms and generating distinct immune responses, two experimental vaccines, a capsule conjugate + Hcp1 subunit vaccine and the live
B. pseudomallei
668 Δ
ilvI
strain, provided significant protection and were down-selected for further investigation and advanced development.
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