The Rewriting of the Female Body Image in Clare Best's Breastless
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The British poet Clare Best after witnessing three of her close female family members struggling with breast cancer and being aware of the fact that due to inheritance factors she is likely to develop the same disease decided to have both her breasts removed in order to reduce her risk. Keeping a journal, writing poems, and having photo shoots were part of her preparation for the surgery as well as of the recovery. Later she collected the poems and the pictures in a publication, Breastless. With the publication of this very intimate and personal work her aim was twofold: on the one hand, she wanted to provide a possible body image for those women who are standing before a surgery like hers, and on the other hand, she wanted “to contribute to ongoing discussions about choice in breast cancer prevention and treatment” (5). When she prepared for the surgery she was struggling with her questions and for some of them there were no answers. In Breastless she offers a support for other women through providing information, her experiences, images, and with the encouragement for asking their own questions and for not giving up the search for the answers. The poems and the photographs give an artistic report of the transformation of her body and they also offer a glimpse into the struggle with her own body image. Since the creation of one’s identity is not an easy task, the transformation of the body makes it even more complicated. The splitting of the body results in the splitting of the identity and the self is constrained to close self-observation in order to redraw its new boundaries. The intimate poems and the narrow cut photographs thus raises the problem of the fragmented self and the process in which she tries to redefine herself and to form an identity as well as a stable subject position.