Chosen scars: Breast cancer and mastectomy tattooing as digital feminist body politics

Abstract

This chapter investigates the growing trend of mastectomy tattoos as an alternative to reconstruction and their implication for a digital feminist body politics. The author explores how body modification practices of tattooing, which have been stigmatised as disfiguring and hyper-masculinised, are incorporated into a ‘breast cancer culture’ as a form of self-care in the cosmetic masking of post-operative mastectomy scars. Through a comparative discourse analysis of Canadian and US-based social media sites used by breast cancer survivors who choose postoperative mastectomy tattoos, she argues that digital media are important sites where competing medical, popular cultural and feminist discourses and practices intersect in complex ways that can contribute to a critical, intersectional and transnational feminist body politics and breast cancer activism.