The Queer Art of Survival

Author(s): Lana Lin

Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1/2, SURVIVAL (SPRING/SUMMER 2016),
pp. 341-346
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/44475195
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The Queer Art of Survival

Lana Lin

When I received a letter from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

inviting me to participate in a study for "Breast Cancer Survivors" rather
than ignoring it as I had other appeals of this sort, I hung on to the en-
closed card, as I imagined it might speak to the notion of survival that I was
pondering for this contribution. The follow-up call that came a few weeks
later made clear why I disown the category of "survivor" and turn instead
to fashioning my own queer art of survival. On the phone the investigator
asked if I had a few moments for her to evaluate my eligibility. After having
her repeat herself several times, during which I misheard her say "distrust"
and "stress," I finally agreed to submit to a " distress " monitor. This would
consist of thirty-four questions that began with ranking my level of dis-
tress in the past two weeks including that day on a scale from one to ten.
I selected "four." Had I experienced distress in the past two weeks includ-
ing that day in relation to child care, housing, insurance, transportation,
work or school, children, partner, depression, fears, nervousness, sadness,
worried ( sic ), spirituality and religion, loss of faith, relating to God, ap-
pearance, bathing and dressing? I was to respond only with a "yes" or "no."
This caused me some distress. I found the questions conceptually suspect
and grammatically problematic, causing me to skip at least one of them.
She then went through a list of eighteen physical symptoms to which I
was again afforded a monosyllabic response. At the end of this barrage, she
inquired if for any of the questions to which I answered "yes" was my dis-
tress related to my breast cancer€ I replied "no." She promptly informed me
that I was not eligible for the study, explaining that it was intended to help
breast cancer survivors and they were looking for women who were expe-

©2016 by Lana Un.All rights reserved.

WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 44: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2016)

341

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342 Lana Lin

riencing distress in relation to their breast cancer or survivorship issues.

noticed that the study presumed that "help" for a "breast cancer survivor
was only warranted if distress was directly related to breast cancer, and
that "survivorship issues" were equated with distress in relation to brea
cancer. I ended the call with the ffustratingly familiar feeling of estrang
ment I continually experienced with the cancer establishment during m
diagnosis and treatment. The exchange brought into relief my discomfo
with the homogenized and naturalized conception of the term "canc
survivor" that pervades cancer discourse. I am, of course, not alone in m
disdain (Ehrenreich 2009; Jain 2013; Sulik 201 1).
To the extent that I associate neither my distress nor my well-being t
cancer, I fail to qualify for the kind of help that those designated as "sur
vivors" would require. That is, survivorship research is neither addresse
to me nor gains from my input. But what exactly is a "survivor" and wh
qualifies as a "survivorship issue"? The National Cancer Institute has
Office of Cancer Survivorship which is dedicated to "the unique needs o
the growing population of cancer survivors and to enhanc[ing] our abili
to address those needs." Despite the tautology that tends to cloud so mu
cancer related discourse, it is all too clear that, in cancer world, there i
a distinction between survival and survivorship. In cancer Ungo, I seem
have no choice but to be labeled a cancer survivor because I have indeed

survived my treatment and am now five years cancer free. I am hailed as a

cancer survivor on every piece of correspondence I receive from the hos-
pital, including the invitation to the study for which I was rejected. But
survivorship is a different matter from survival. Survivorship, it would
seem, is not something to which one defaults as a result of surviving treat-
ment. Rather, survivorship is a particular stance vis-à-vis one s ongoing
status as a survivor, for survivors do not merely survive, but take on, han-
dle, negotiate, and manage their survivorship. Survivorship is a category
of experience that has been instrumentalized and politicized. Cure, the
free magazine distributed to cancer patients and "survivors" which Utters
the tables of cancer-dinic waiting rooms across the country, has a special
section devoted to "navigating survivorship." Apparently food, physical ap-
pearance, mobihty, pain, sleep, and psychological states are survivorship
issues, although, as the study for which I was inehgible attests, only to the
extent that cancer is held responsible for such distressors.
What if those of us who have experienced or are experiencing cancer
adopt a different relationship toward that which has been deemed "survi-

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 The Queer Art of Survival 343

The Cancer Journals Revisited (work-in-progress, 2016), digital collage by Lin + Lam.

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344 Lana Lin

The Cancer Journals Revisited (work-in-progress, 2016), digital collage by Lin + Lam.

This content downloaded from 198.188.210.37 on Wed, 07 Mar 2018 03:51:06 UTC
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 The Queer Art of Survival 345

vorship"? Is there a way to "queer" survivorship, and to turn it into what I

am somewhat playfully calling a "queer art of survival"? With this phrase,
I borrow Judith Halberstams "queer art of failure," which "dismantles the
logics of success and failure with which we currently live" (201 1, 2). Per-
haps this impulse can be imported into the cancer complex to dismantle
the logics of success and failure with which we live and die; that is, perhaps
it can be used to dismantle the logics of survivorship. That easy slippage
between distress and distrust, a slippage that may turn upon the failure to
maintain composure or the failure to secure trust, is, I venture, precisely
the mode of inhabitance many occupy post-cancer diagnosis. "Survivors"
can fail to beat their cancer, fail to maintain optimism, fail to find spiritual
transformation in their reconfigured relation to mortality. But given that
the language of oncology is constructed around failure - it is the patient
who fails the treatment, and not the other way around - how can survi-
vorship be rehabilitated to encompass a range of survivals that include
pessimism, disinterest, cynicism, indifference, distraction, uncertainty,
contradiction, crankiness, and complexity? Although by no means mutu-
ally exclusive, queers and those who have had cancer can learn from one
another as vulnerable groups who face threats to the prospect of survival on
a regular basis. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who lived with her cancer for
eighteen years, queer survival is made up of an "irreducible multilayered-
ness and multiphasedness" that upends those neat categorizations seeking
to bureaucratize and institutionalize "survivorship" (1993, 3). Speaking of
violence against queers in all its forms, including external assaults and the
AIDS crisis, Sedgwick understood the multidimensionality of survival as
necessarily "complicated by how permeable the identity survivor' must be
to the undiminishing currents of risk, illness, mourning, and defiance" (3).
This definition of queer survival acknowledges the protective distrust that
Audre Lorde found justified for those who "were never meant to survive"
(1978, 32). This queer art of survival embraces the entanglements of dis-
tress in their very unaccountability.

Lana Lin is an artist whose work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and

Whitney Museum, NY; the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival; and the
Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Her book on the psychic effects of cancer, Freud's
Jaw and Other Lost Objects, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She is
associate professor in media studies at the New School and has collaborated with Lam
since 2001.

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346 Lana Lin

H. Lan Thao Lam is an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and the New Museum
New York. She has received fellowships from Canada Council for the Arts and Ve
List Center for Art & Politics. She is assistant professor at Parsons Fine Arts and h
collaborated with Lin since 2001.

Works Cited

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive

Thinking Has Undermined America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Halberstam, Judith. 201 1. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Jain, S. Lochlann. 2013. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1978. "A Litany for Survival." In The Black Unicorn. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sulik, Gayle A. 201 1. Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines
Women s Health. New York: Oxford University Press.

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