Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyses women’s artistic representations regarding their changing bodies across cancer experiences. Expanding the normal, the amputated, bald, asymmetric, scarred and reconstructed body, dismantle stereotypes of what we assume as female, sensual, beautiful, strong and whole.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation intersects the results of a research trilogy, conducted between 2005 and 2019, about women’s knowledge, narratives and artistic representations regarding their changing bodies across cancer experiences. Gathering two different lists of art projects across the Internet, going across and beyond breast cancer, opening the research to the many organs and malignancies depicted in women’s representations of oncology’s material culture, we will discuss how art takes part in the process of rethinking and reconstructing lives and bodies. The arts, and photography in particular, predominant over other media, exposes hidden realities that normally stay unnoticed behind clothes and prosthetic devices. Increasing the visual list of what we understand as normal, the amputated, bald, asymmetric, scarred and reconstructed body, dismantle stereotypes of what we assume as healthy, female, sensual, beautiful, strong and whole. From theory to practice, the researcher also transferred to paper the stories of women and cancer patients from her own relational circle, completing the texts with drawings, paintings and photographs. In this illustrated monograph, we also find women and experiences that redefine understandings of wholeness, finding completeness within new body contours, refusing medical implants and prostheses, enhancing and extending their flesh and bodies through alternative objects, materialities and substances, from make-up and clothes to the reconstructive ink of tattoos.

Keywords: art; cancer; amputation; alternative beauty and wholeness