Cancer--

In 2018 well over 1.5 million people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer, the most common being breast, lung, and bronchus cancer. Besides the money-making business (or charities; you decide) and the occasional film depicting the sad events, why is no one talking about this all too common occurrence?  

There is something to be said about the need for empowerment, the need to not break down another woman, and there are many ways to do so. In Chikako Takeshita’s book, The Global Politics of the IUD, we see how many women have battled the medical community to get a form of birth control and arguably created an encouraging community of users in the process of. Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals works in a completely different way. She uses her own venerability and lets other experience alongside her the trial and tribulations of treatment and healing. This is not a single experience to share to the world, Lorde’s book has been handed out time and time again to let women know they are not alone, as explained in Rafia Zakaria’s article in The Guardian.

She says, “Making my way through the book’s pages, I found a different model of feminist power – not a sidestepping of sickness, but a defiant avowal of the reality of pain and respect for the transformed self it leaves behind. I emerged as neither a contradiction nor an oxymoron, but a vanguard, a model, for others less brave.” She is not the only one to feel these things.

In my own experience, I can see that it is beyond encouraging and supportive, but I have had no bodily experience with sickness beyond my own mind. My sister however struggled with a major surgery and two rounds of treatment in order to rid herself of sickness present in her thyroid. In her process of treatment and healing she shut out from the world in a lot of ways.  She refused to let her high school classmates know what she was even going through, and she refused to take a step back from her workload. I wish I could go back in time and give her this book, even if she pretended not to read it; she’s a sucker for a good read. This book would have been able to lend a helping hand in something none of my family members could have been able to do. Besides the small gifts and prayers every corner she turned- there would have been someone relating to many of the things she experienced in constant doctors’ appointments, surgery, treatment, and post ops.

The only argument possible against any form of poetry and writing Lorde graces society with would be is details; about women’s bodies that still seem to be taboo in many parts of society. In her writing, Lorde tries to break these barriers and plenty of others.  

Cancer occurs often, it is a sickness constantly trying to be cured and prevented. Although it grazes news headlines occasionally, one often has to seek out information on their own. Audre Lorde in her book tries to make it a conversation, a support system, and works to combat the ideas of cancer and healing ‘taboo’.

women V the world

A few weeks ago, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified with the United States Senate in order to inform the public about Brett Kavanaugh’s actions in high school. She broke hearts and related to a lot of people nationally, and I’m sure internationally, with the sharing of her story of assault. Living in the US, I’m highly judgmental of the situation and have been drowned in news coverage as well as social media discussion on the topic.

With little to no control over the nominee at this point, there were many arguments circulating. Some were that Kavanaugh shouldn’t even be in the running, other had arguments about when a woman’s accusation could be taken seriously, and others argued about politics and blamed the respective parties for trying to take each other down. 

I wondered how other countries are seeing this debacle and newly appointed Supreme Court Justice. My first thought, although ignorant and prideful, would have been that other countries are just dealing with the same issues but in different ways so no one would be judging the US for accusations against high members of society. The answer is a little unclear, because it’s not cut and dry, but the most important country to be taking notes from this entire situation might be the United States themselves, more so than anyone else. 

We need to do this, and looking back into history, we could have done it better a lot. The US takes pride in being a melting pot, while rejecting immigrants in modern politics. We pride ourselves on breaking off from Great Britain and forming our own army, expanding and taking control, while not giving appreciation to those we took the land from. During Roosevelt’s presidency we prided ourselves on flaunting our military power yet not using it, but have inserted ourselves into just about every middle eastern conflict in recent history. More recently, maybe in the same light as immigration issues, we compare ourselves to other countries and say ‘women are just better off here’. Saying this we ignore the fact that women are paid roughly 79 cents to the mans dollar, 10 million women are the victims of domestic violence every year, and women are more likely than men to be in poverty. 

In searching for other people’s points of views, from foreign countries specifically, I found a Washington Post Article that did just this. The comment that surprised me most, again out of ignorance, was that from a lawyer from Ghana. Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah said, “People would have asked for him to be rejected, and I can imagine that it would have been a cross-party consensus,” shedding a little light on the fact that even a third world country can have higher standards for government officials. In countries like China and France people mentioned their apologies to Ford but also mentioned things along the lines of needing a public, full investigation, and the parties needing to stop their battles against one another and needing to concentrate on bettering the country. Banu Altunbas, a Turkish humanitarian, mentioned it would be hard to compare Turkey and the US because of the different cultures and contexts; which was my main concern. 

Regardless of point of view or opinions on the largely publicized issue, there was still no in depth investigation. Dr. Ford and the other women who accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, and Kavanaugh himself were not interviewed by the FBI; so no real conclusion can be drawn about the situation because there is unfortunately no hard evidence. It’s also worth mentioning that no matter what countries, or if they even, take notes from this predicament it’s possible that women will never be on the same pedestal as men. For centuries upon centuries men have been given opportunities and advantages that women have not been given, so even if equality is given, we may be looking over the historical disadvantages. 

The United States most importantly needs to use this as a time to reflect, although other countries could too.  I say this with crossed fingers, but we can’t be like this forever, right? Women hopefully one day won’t be second class citizens...

In Argentina there is an entire, in some cases, two generations from families missing. The Dirty War was one of the final military coups out of a good 9 during the 1900’s. Nearly 30,000 men and women were taken at night and were simply considered ‘disappeared’ because the government was trying to rid the political environment of its leftists opponents. Many of the women who were taken in the middle of the night were pregnant or had small babies. The new borns and ones born in captivity were often given away to people in support of the new government, to this day only 128 of them have been genetically identified and returned to their families (they are fully grown obviously). This New York Times article explains a little bit of this. 

It is because of instances like these and many other that I believe Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the Spanish translation Our Bodies, Our Lives was not received the same way by women the way the US did in the 1977 edition. It sold around 250,000 copies in the US and when translated only sold 50,000 copies between the US and Latin and South America.  The reason for this could have been the many ways politics and political climate effect a country and its people; women’s health might not have been the main concern. 

In particular I’m thinking about the conservative mindset and the regions practices in the Latin American countries like Mexico and El Salvador. Kathy Davis discusses these topics in her book The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Not only did Catholicism get in the way of modern medicine, but so did many of the political policies (surrounding abortions and women’s reproductive health). They of course considered these things when translating the book, but it did not have the reach that the US version had. This is also within the context of the 1977 version, not the edition of the early 2000’s.

The biggest idea I wanted to hit on was all the conflicts going on in Latin American countries in the late 20th century. The explosion of Netflix series highlighting drug cartels and drug-lords will show anyone in a few episodes the major role drugs played in the late 80’s, Colombia fell victim in particular. Mexico, a country with deep and long history, struggled particularly in the 80’s  with a financial crisis and an earthquake that claimed thousands of casualties. Many women or those reading the book were not so much concerned (possibly) with improving their health and access to knowledge but mores with living through a financial crisis, drug war, or just general violence in their neighborhoods. From the example in Argentina though, the book didn’t even have an audience to reach. Women went missing in the middle of the night and the government had control over just about everything. 

Despite the many issues the book faced in the US and the Spanish translation, it still has an incredible story about the collective of women who took the initiative under their wings. Even in countries that were yet to develop into first world nations, Our Bodies, Our lives helped women access knowledge and information that was necessary in the ever changing issue of women’s health care and safety; I think it's just important to remember it was not the same for the countries the book was spreading to.