Creative geographies and living on from breast cancer: The enlivening potential of autobiographical bricolage for an aesthetics of precarity

Abstract

This paper is located at the intersection of scholarship on creative geographies and geographies of dying, death and “living on” (survival). It explores the intimate experience of breast cancer through the practice of creative bricolage which uses autobiographical poetry and photographs. Employing a roving writing strategy that allows for multiple entry points and connectivities surrounding the complex meshworks of precarious cancer survival, the paper traverses health, emotional, environmental and political concerns. In so doing, the paper makes three key contributions: first, in considering how a creative sensibility might bring more visceral, emotionally sensitive and politically embedded accounts of death, dying and survival into the realm of geographical visibility; second, in exploring some of the potentials and limitations of using do‐it‐yourself bricolage as a creative practice; and third, in revealing how a geographical mindset, with its attention to multiple intersecting sites and its ability to promulgate holistic relational understanding, can widen the aesthetic terrain of breast cancer beyond dominant tropes of consumerist sentimentality or heroic femininity towards an aesthetics of precarity.

From coping to carrying on: A pragmatic laughter between life and death

“…Significantly, laughing at this moment did not mean the encounter becomes devoid of all emotion (Bergson, ); it was a sad time (and still is) and therefore remains a moment of political and ethical attunement that is framed by complex emotional and affective encounters (Madge, ). Yet the laughter brings these various incongruous emotional, affective, imaginative, hopeful, hopeless, affirmative and negating modes together to animate or dramatise “the intricacies, intimacies and hesitancies involved in facing finitude” (Madge, , p. 2) in some way. Neither does laughter mark a forgetting of finitude (Harrison, ).…”

“…Closer to the specific themes of this paper, there have recently been calls for “enlivened” geographical accounts of death and dying (Stevenson et al., ). These kinds of accounts have largely focused on personal, embodied accounts of survival, grief and remembrance (Maddrell, , ; Madge, , ; Stevenson, ). Maddrell (), for instance, has looked to revitalise the ways in which we might “map” the geographies of mourning and remembrance in ways that account for emotional/affective spatialities alongside wider social relations that help to formulate senses of place.…”

“…Similarly, through discussing “suicidal journeys,” Stevenson (, p. 191) argues that death and dying are “vibrant and vital” and that we need a more relational understanding of death in terms of the ways it is folded into the practices of life. Elsewhere Tyner () suggests a need for political engagements with death “on the ground,” particularly in terms of survivability, with Clare Madge (, ) advancing this through arguing for a more compassionate and caring politico‐ethic that places the visceral and emotional aspects of encountering death, dying and surviving at its core.…”

“…Following Madge's (, ) call for more visceral and emotional accounts of death and dying, this paper looks to explore the ways in which experiences of laughter, life and death – such as the one described above – can be understood in more affirmative terms. Drawing on seven months of “non‐representational” ethnographic engagements with two nursing care homes (Vannini, ), it argues that for care workers, in particular, the relationship between laughter, life and death often remains experientially separate from governance theories such as bio/necropolitics (Mbembe, ) and therefore needs to be apprehended in terms of more pragmatic politico‐ethical projects, similar to those found in vitalist philosophies of life.…”

Editorial: Emotional geography and Transactions

“…For some papers this has been reflected in the use of more novel methods of data collection, including the use of photographical images (Browne et al., ), story boards (Ansell et al., ), and art activism (Cook et al., ). Madge () explores the “enlivening potential” of creative geographies in an “autobiographical bricolage,” in which she talks about the emotional geographies of “living on” from experiences of breast cancer. For Madge, her emotions as researcher are clearly the emotions of the research subject; for others, there is a greater separation.…”