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.

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