Cancer Narratives; Life Story:digital Story

Queering the Temporality of Cancer Survivorship

by Mary Bryson

Jackie Stacey and Mary Bryson

Survivorship suggests a temporal relation. It speaks to the endurance of past trauma and looks forward to a future... more Survivorship suggests a temporal relation. It speaks to the endurance of past trauma and looks forward to a future that it wills into being through the overcoming of adversity. This article traces the warped temporalities of cancer survivorship, exploring its queer dimensions by combining theoretical discussions with readings of two lesbian interventions that address normative visions and narrations of healthy/diseased bodies. Cancer survivorship in each case becomes a poetic narration of desire and disease through the queering of temporality. The authors argue that the extent to which cancer's time warp here belongs to queer temporality depends on whether the queerness refers only to the odd, the uncanny, the indeterminate and the undecidable. Or if, instead, cancer's time warp is queer in the sense that sexuality is already present in cancer's disturbance to temporality. In so far as queer carries with it the traces of sexualities deemed undesirable and perverse, then such connections move beyond an analogous and into an ontological register.