“I feel like I’m getting butchered,”
Ana said as we caught up over coffee. Last January, she found a familiar lump on her breast. The doctors confirmed her fears that her cancer, which had gone into remission a few years ago, had returned. This time, the only way to make it out alive was by sacrificing one of her breasts.
Participating in this project, in her eyes, was a means of reclaiming agency. Baring her skin, peering into the lens, basking in the soft light, she proclaimed herself the subject rather than a mere object. Without reservation, she showed off her breasts. These, to her, are symbols of love and nurturing. To lose one of them, she says, feels like losing part of her femininity. She op ted to replace the malignant member with silicone in a couple of months.
Growing up, Elai felt more boyish than other girls. This was not a matter of simply being rougher and not dainty – he felt there was a stark difference between how he sees himself and how his body presents itself to the world. He then sought to consolidate the two ideas: at age sixteen, he started wearing a binder around his chest. At twenty, he had a mastectomy.
“How you’re perceived is how you feel,”
he said.
Regarding how they feel about their breasts, Elai and Ana sit on opposite ends. Ana grieved the removal as it marked the loss of identity, but Elai celebrated the excision as it meant gaining his masculinity.
Finally, we have Em, whose breasts are neither a signifier nor an obstacle to their identity. They are simply breasts.
Without disregarding the importance of gender, they also main tain that it does not need to be at the forefront of how we perceive others. Em would rather invite us to look into other aspects of ourselves. Em has a collection of seemingly symmetri cal tattoos but upon closer inspection, are not. This ink on their body acts as armour – not from any danger, but from expectations.
“By augmenting my body, I get to give this clue that there’s something different.”
They are not meant to ward anyone off. Rather, they mean to say, look deeper.
Ana, Elai, and Emma have each – in their own way – chosen to maintain agency over their anatomies. Through the removal of breasts, the recon struction of one, and the carving of symbols on one’s skin, they declare that while we may not have control over the bodies we’re born with, we do have control over the identities we embody. These are maps full of bumps and curves, but we still get to draw the lines.
This is a shortened version of Miguel’s photo essay ‘Lines, Bumps, and Curves’.
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