A BREAST PROSTHESIS AFTER CANCER - A PRES CRIPTION FOR WHOM - AND WHY

A paper read before a cancerology convention as a patient-witness to s peak on the subject of ''The Quality of Life after Breast Cancer''. A breast amputation is experienced by many women as identity harming and breast cancer Is one of the few diseases whose aftereffects are perce ived as esthetic damage. By virtue of the conventional view of THE wom an, a view which is internalized by women since childhood a ''reconstr uction'' of the breast is almost automatically proposed as compensatio n for the said damage. The institutional violence underlying this inju nction is analyzed here and rejected as basically misogynist. An alter native view is offered where accepting one's asymmetry is validated as the basis of a new art of living. The Amazon author shoots an arrow a t close range against the prejudices that leave the mastectomized wome n alone with their ''terrible secret''.