ABSTRACT
Susan Gubar, a scholar whose work is foundational to feminist literary studies, records her experiences as an ovarian cancer patient in her 2012 book Memoir of a Debulked Woman. This chapter suggests that Gubar is determined to put shame and disgust to work politically by first addressing important questions about the current medical treatments available to women suffering from ovarian cancer. Then, she had done this by scrutinizing the range and cultural appropriateness of the emotional and writerly responses to such gendered illnesses. When Gubar remarks that her decision to write about her shame "twists" her "into knots", she points to the embodiness of shame, the way that shame is "not only a self-conscious emotion" but is also "body-conscious". Gubar is also aware that writing shame can take a "toll" not only "on the body that writes" but also on "the bodies that read or listen".
