In her article, Gay confronts the reductive-not to mention counterintuitive-nature of essential feminism and the exclusive stereotypes it produces, while addressing her own reservations towards embracing feminism itself. Gay, an American essayist and commentator, describes essential feminism as “the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist,” leaving those who do not live up to societal expectations feeling unfit or inadequate to identify themselves as such (pg. In her 2012 article “Bad Feminist,” published by VQR, Roxane Gay suggests that many of the tensions and negative connotations that accompany the term feminism can be attributed to a damaging, socially-constructed concept deemed essential feminism. Center for Literary and Comparative Studies.
This article was originally published on. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. And that was just the beginning.įrom “HEALING: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient” by Theresa Brown. The nurse was lost on the bottom, the patient flailing on the top. It was still sunny and a little colder than normal for September, but I had changed.
Not even a day had passed since I started my testing. She put her arms around me, a stranger, and said, “They can cure this.” But that was what I did: comforted strangers. The ultrasound tech came back into the room so quietly I didn’t hear her, but suddenly her arms were around me. Not just any kind of patient, either, but a cancer patient. My nurse-self had abandoned me and I had become a patient. Fear had found me and everything seemed upside down. “This looks ugly.” She left, and as soon as I heard the door latch, I sat up and sobbed, my whole body shaking. I’d had those before and they’re not cancerous. “Could it be a fibroid adenoma?” I blurted out. Actual mortality-which is to say, mine-had never, before this moment, seemed real. Other people’s mortality is categorically different from one’s own. I figured I was knowledgeable enough about having cancer because I knew about specific cancers, that I understood cancer patients’ feelings because I’d cared for so many, that I’d confronted mortality because I’d had a number of patients die. I knew the importance of letting the doctor finish the scan, that panicking wouldn’t help me or her as she took final measurements or did whatever she had to do. I’m a former oncology nurse and a hospice nurse. Tears dribbled out of each eye and slid down the sides of my face as I lay, silent, on the exam table. I didn’t move, speak, or sit up, but I did begin to cry, slowly. It might seem like she could have said more, but those four words were already too many. I saw her in profile, gray hair pulled back from her face, her eyes focused on the screen. Finally she said, “I see a mass.” A mass. She took a long time, which annoyed me, and then, once I considered why she might be slow, scared me. I might have wondered why the tech left, but instead I read my neon pink book, word by word, without knowing what I was reading.Ī questionable scan merits an on-the-spot reading by an on-site radiologist, who came in and redid the ultrasound. I waited calmly in the hallway in between the two scans, and then I waited in the ultrasound room after the tech left and before the radiologist came in. I had a mammogram and an ultrasound: right side only. Well, not always, but often, and I’d sweated the “need for additional screening” enough times that I had convinced myself there’s no value to being anxious in advance. I had mentioned it to my husband, Arthur, who was out of town, but no one else. The color of a bad, as in badass, feminist: the kind of person who reads Bad Feminist while waiting for a mammogram. The inside cover of the book is neon pink-not the girlish pink of Disney princesses and bubble gum, but a knowing, winking pink. I was reading Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay the day I went for my scan. Host Jane Clayson speaks with Theresa Brown about her new book “ Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient,” which intertwines stories of her work as an oncology and cancer nurse with her own treatment following a breast cancer diagnosis.