ABSTRACT
The breast is the flesh that nurtures, offers reassurance and comfort; an infant's embodied memory is buried long after the last suckle. Worldwide, diseases of the breast are among the most common diseases that affect women. While most women defined themselves as women, feminine and sexual in terms of their breasts, many were embarrassed that they found it impossible to dispense with social attitudes. Creative work visual art, photography, poetry writing, making a quilt provide people with a relatively unstructured way of working through emotions related to life-threatening illness and body loss, pain, grief and fear. Other photographs and texts captured women's experiences of the disease and its treatment: the confusion and pain of diagnosis and surgery, the shock of chemotherapy. Prostheses disguise a false eye, for instance, covers an empty socket; a prosthetic breast disguises the excision of a diseased breast sending a message of 'normalcy' to others despite evidence to the contrary.
