Verbal and Visual Rhetorics of Cancer: Defying Silence in Margaret Edson, Audre Lorde and Jo Spence’s Works

In this essay I offer some powerful verbal and visual examples of the rhetorics of cancer in an attempt to bring to our attention the experiences and reflections of those who felt more like medical cases than persons-patients while facing and eventually dying because of cancer. My essay is a critical “travelogue” through the pain of the other, more specifically as it is presented in Margaret Edson’s play Wit (2000), Audre Lorde’s memoir The Cancer Journals (1992), and Jo Spence verbal and visual memoirs Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography (1988) and Cultural Snipping: The Art of Transgression (1995)