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The Empowered Woman and Encounters with Breast Cancer, the Year’s Chick Disease: Sick Lit and the Work of Memoir in the Postfeminist Decade

  • Author / Creator
    Rasmussen, Lucinda M
  • This dissertation examines a postfeminist subgenre of women’s autobiography referred to as “sick lit.” The primary texts, all published between 2004 and 2009 are: Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Breastless in the City: A Young Woman’s Story of Love, Loss, and Breast Cancer by Cathy Bueti, Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy by Geralyn Lucas, Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer is Really Distracting by Meredith Norton, My One Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan, and Nordie’s at Noon: The Personal Stories of Four Women “Too Young” for Breast Cancer by Patti Balwanz, Jana Peters, Kim Carlos, and Jennifer Johnson. I show that sick lit is a postfeminist manifestation of a genre of life writing more broadly known as the breast cancer narrative. While the breast cancer narrative was initially clearly a product of second-wave feminism in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, sick lit’s contents and paratexts reflect the presence of postfeminism as an oppressive and pervasive ideology, one which now discourages its authors from making explicit “feminist” demands for gender equity despite the fact that they write of encountering oppressive circumstances. Sick lit is written by women who have been aggressively targeted by a heteronormative consumer culture which conveys the message that consumption is an antidote to breast cancer. These authors frequently use irreverent humour and self deprecation in the form of confession to talk about the struggles they experience as a part of this social order. Thus, sick lit resembles the contemporary women’s fiction known as chick lit, as well as the chick flick. While I argue that sick lit is an aesthetic strategy which some writers use to reclaim their identities after cancer and, even at times, to unsettle the normative social order, ultimately, sick-lit writers—particularly those tied to breast cancer’s cause-related marketing campaigns—are yoked to commodity culture in ways which jeopardizes the legacy they might otherwise earn through life writing. For these reasons, sick lit helps to reveal postfeminism’s harms and potentials at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Graduation date
    Spring 2014
  • Type of Item
    Thesis
  • Degree
    Doctor of Philosophy
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/R3SB3X42H
  • License
    This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.
  • Language
    English
  • Institution
    University of Alberta
  • Degree level
    Doctoral
  • Department
  • Specialization
    • English
  • Supervisor / co-supervisor and their department(s)
  • Examining committee members and their departments
    • Dr. Jo-Ann Wallace (English and Film Studies)
    • Dr. Amy Kaler (Department of Sociology)
    • Dr. Hilary Clark (University of Saskatchewan)
    • Dr. Julie Rak (English and Film Studies)
    • Dr. Daphne Read (English and Film Studies)