Gently Worn Out Sister

Abstract

Gently Worn Out Sister is a piece of writing that accompanies an ongoing body of portrait and still life photographs made with an 8x10 view camera, titled The Ice Palace Is Gone. The photographs and writing were made in reflection of my diagnosis and treatment for lymphatic cancer and the network of care through which I began to heal and rebuild. I position this network as a larger symbol for the varied and complicated notions around the phrase "queer community," taking as primary sources two breast cancer memoirs, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Catherine Lord's The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation. The writing reflects upon three years of remission from cancer, including the process of making the work and conducting its research. I consulted two image libraries for the completion of this work, the Outweek collection at the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library and the Hannah Wilke collection at Ronald Feldman Gallery, both in New York. Because my photographs largely engage with fictional elements, my own analysis in the writing is interjected with excerpts from a piece of fiction I started writing during recovery, in which the protagonist is an unnamed "she."