ABSTRACT
Carolyn Ellis suggests that the intimacy, chaos and truth of autoethnography are aspects that need to be incorporated into academia, in order to produce a humanistic and authentic learning and teaching environment. I offer here my own subjective account of breast cancer, one filtered through black humour. The price of survival was the blunt force trauma of having the signifiers of femininity excised. I could no longer procreate, my left breast was removed and I was suddenly post-menopausal. A hairless, anaemic zombie I hid, drunk with pain or high on medication and in complete shock from ‘potentially life-extending’ procedures. My crude and unapologetically self-obsessed satire is a linguistic form that mirrors my experience of and response to the seeming erasure of the symbols of my identity. My comedy challenges cultural expectations about (a) just what constitutes womanliness or authentic femininity and (b) what makes a woman a feminist. The paradox of exploring myself as a discursive object through black-humoured feminist dramaturgy is one that has helped me gain ownership over the cancer narrative. But I hope also that it exemplifies the importance of testimonies that disturb the reader whilst contributing to the normalizing of discourse around devastating illness and disease.
