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During the spring of 2020, literary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were quick to appear. Poetry, essays and diaries proliferated, and collective initiatives sprang up, with authors delving into a crisis that was national as well as global; political as well as health-based. In their lockdown works, US-based authors tackled their experience in the context of the country, chronicling the virus alongside inequality, racism and environmental challenges. Sheltering in place on either side of the Continental Divide, Pam Houston and Amy Irvine maintained an intense correspondence that was later published as Air Mail. Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place, which this article approaches as representative of ecofeminist COVID literature. It tracks their epistolary journey from the self to the social and back, discussing their narrative of the pandemic within the framework of their shared stance. Their letters are read as heirs to second-wave feminism and analysed as one instance of the current permeation of ecofeminist theories, specifically the material perspective. Through the study of Houston and Irvine's correspondence, this article aims to illuminate the cultural work done by American ecofeminist writers during an extraordinary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life-writing genre, and more specifically the memoir subgenre, are fertile ground for survivors of sexual violence wanting to share their plight and/or to raise awareness about rape. Chanel Miller is an Asian American artist educated in California. In 2015 she attended a Stanford campus party and was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a White undergraduate student and athlete. Four years later, she wrote a memoir about her experience entitled Know My Name. Building on previous works on Miller's text from the field of trauma studies, and acknowledging the memory turn in lifewriting scholarship, this article tackles the dialectic between the presence and absence of memories in the narrative, and the gendered implications of this dialectic. It analyses how the book critically exposes the workings of rape culture and illustrates how Miller creates a counternarrative where the absence of memories of the rape triggers alternative narratisation strategies. I argue that Miller activates an authoritative voice that can be inserted in the feminist tradition of life writing, while at the same time building an alternative frame of justice that stems from the author-reader relationship rather than from a particular understanding of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1993, The New York Times Magazine published a story entitled 'The anguished politics of breast cancer.' The image on the cover was a self-portrait of artist and model Matuschka showing the physical consequences of a radical mastectomy. The picture elicited heated reactions, and the protagonist became an icon of the Women's Health Movement. Twelve years later, another model and photographer, Lynn Kohlman, published Front to back, which included portraits of her body after treatments for breast and brain cancer. Although free of the marks of pink ribbon culture, Kohlman's work was framed within the dominant discourse of breast cancer in the twenty-first century, characterized by individualism, positive thinking, and the idea of consumer's choice. This paper discusses Matuschka's and Kohlman's cancer photography within a comparative diachronic framework, focusing on the turn-of-the-century politics of representation. We argue that, despite their common traits, their respective productions are signs of a radical shift in the cultural paradigm of breast cancer. Through an analysis of the studium of their photographs and the preferred meaning that they suggest, we conclude that Matuschka's project feeds into the feminist battle for equity in health initiated by the early Breast Cancer Movement, whereas Kohlman's strengthens the postfeminist stance that is prevalent in the current panorama of neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the cancer storylines in the television series "Sex and the City," and "Desperate Housewives." The author discusses the female identities of Samantha Jones, the character in "Sex and the City" who has breast cancer and Lynette Scavo in "Desperate Housewives" who has a lymphoma in her neck, as they undergo chemotherapy. Jones's lack of children is compared to Scavo's role as a mother to her children during her illness. The two programs' chemotherapy party scenes and the influence the shows have had on cancer survivors are discussed.