Date of Award

8-2025

Degree Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

School

Humanities

Committee Chair

Dr. Emily B. Stanback

Committee Chair School

Humanities

Committee Member 2

Dr. Erika Luckert

Committee Member 2 School

Humanities

Committee Member 3

Dr. Leah Parker

Committee Member 3 School

Humanities

Abstract

For 6 months starting in December of 2024, I went through an extended diagnostic process to determine the nature of masses in my breasts. The process is still ongoing. Meanwhile, I have been reading and writing about literary depictions of breast cancer and disfigured breasts, forging what I have experienced as a literary crip kinship with Audre Lorde, Fanny Burney, and, surprisingly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Geraldine. These literary figures, and my own experience, have raised many of the same questions in my mind—of betrayal, of a sense of foreboding evil. How do my own experiences with breast biopsies, mammograms, and MRIs conversate with literary depictions of cancerous and disfigured breasts—and why might it matter to seek the kind of kinship I feel that I have forged with Lorde, Burney, and Geraldine?

In this thesis, I use Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fanny Burney, and Audre Lorde to explore questions of crip kinship and breast disfigurement. By looking at the Romantic era I look at a time when, much like our own, conceptions of disability were both expansive and disparate. Fanny Burney echoes common Romantic era practices of demonizing female breasts within a letter chronicling her unanesthetized mastectomy. A similar deprecation appears in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Christabel,” when the speaker refers to Geraldine’s breast as “a sight to dream of, not to tell!” (line 253). Even Lorde endures the remnants of breast-centered fears in 1978, as other women attempted to convince her to obtain prostheses for her removed cancerous breast.

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