<i>Tekhnē</i>of reconstruction: breast cancer, norms, and fleshy rearrangements

Abstract

This essay is an engagement with and a rejoinder to Audre Lorde's framing of prosthetics and breast reconstruction in her seminal The Cancer Journals. Given that, as Susan Merrill Squier has argued, human life is increasingly defined and understood in terms of discourses and possibilities for the “instrumental deployment of resources for bodily renewal,” this essay explores how the body/materiality might be understood in relation to the tekhneē (the technologies, techniques, and craft) of reconstruction three decades after Lorde's account.