Rhetoric

Phil Nel sent along this article after I posted my latest City Paper article:  "Living with Cancer: Coming to Terms," by Susan Gubar.  Gubar is a professor, and for me she marks changes in my own academic process:

• When I was an undergraduate, her work turned me on in ways that led to the career I have now.  As an English major, I read Madwoman in the Attic and basically though, "OMG they are right!  Literature demonstrates horrific sexism, and here's how 19th c. women writers responded to that!  Activism that was available to them!"  It not only taught me about how authors could respond to sexism, but she helped me to understand feminism and how it manifested in the world.  And how you can identify it in its subtle ways and write about it.  That book affected my life.
• Then I hit grad school and had the opportunity to 1) read more feminist things, and 2) recognize that feminism was growing and shifting away from things like Madwoman in the Attic.  The damages and dangers in the world weren't limited to middle-class white woman (and I talked to a scholar in grad school who actually did argue this--rejecting what my students and I call intersectionality).  This is an easy and problematic way for me to identify that, but she was someone who did second wave feminism and I did third wave.

Now here she is again, someone whose writing is resonating with me because she's an academic, and she has ovarian cancer.  The article I read was about the rhetoric surrounding cancer.  She wrote things like

So I was delighted to encounter an essay by another friend who encourages linguistic exuberance with respect to this matter of self-definition. In an article composed nine years before her death from metastatic breast cancer, the witty queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick recommended acronyms like BBP (Bald Barfing Person) and WAPHMO (Woman About to go Postal at H.M.O.). She then confided that she personally had alternated between PSHIFTY (Person Still Hanging In Fine Thank You) and QIBIFA (Quite Ill, But Inexplicably Fat Anyway) until she settled on “undead.”

None of those terms resonate with me, but I'm glad to read that she and a colleague/friend/person- whose-writing-knocked-my-socks-off-in-graduate-school were exploring how to say what you're experiencing.

And here's Maybelle--often a good way to end a blog post.  She and her Poppi are thrilled for the appropriate Cookeville experience:  they were buying butter twists at Ralph's.