Personal/Political: Defining and Redefining Life and Identity Through Autopathographies of Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals) and Srutimala Duara ( My Journey Through Cancer)

Abstract

Personal accounts of diseases, as well as testimonies by patients, have taken the power to define diseases away from physicians and given it to patients. Through such accounts, which are now known as autopathographies, the affected describe the struggle of fighting a disease that involves pain; they try to see their changed position in the family and society, and also their changed body conditions, and try to cope with the changes through narrating their experience. They intend to break the silence around words like cancer and make society aware of the actual condition of the affected, and thus help people with similar plights to deal with what they encounter.