The Cancer Journals

How is Lorde’s emphasis on the importance of language related to Structuralist ideas and, particularly, the use of language to critique the “discourse of patriarchy?”

Compare The Cancer Journals to Susan Sontag’s Illness as a Metaphor, which was written two years before Lorde’s work. How do both works reframe the way in which society thinks about the victims of terminal maladies?

How does Lorde’s journal operate as a tool of protest? With consideration to her mention of “a concert of voices” from within herself, how does her use of journal entries in the text reflect her determination to express as many facets of her experience as she can?

In another one of her books, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), Lorde writes about male-identified women—that is, women whose sense of self is largely defined by how men perceive and respond to them. Are there examples in this text of male-identified women, or ideas that reflect a pronounced identification with patriarchy?

Literary scholar Jeanne Perrault has described Lorde’s work as “a writing of self that makes the female body a site and source of written subjectivity, yet inhabits that body with the ethics of a deeply historical, political, sexual, and racial consciousness.” How do Lorde’s approaches to narrative and voice in The Cancer Journals affirm Perrault’s idea?

How do Lorde’s self-characterizations challenge notions of the subaltern—that is, groups that are categorically subordinate—and embrace heterogeneity, or the sense of encompassing multiple categories of identity?

What do you think of Lorde’s position on the wearing of prostheses? Do you agree that women who make this choice are often doing it to ensure others’ comfort with their appearances? Why or why not?

What lessons does The Cancer Journals offer about happiness and self-acceptance, even for women who have not survived cancer or undergone mastectomies?