She Survives 3

I am revisiting an old subject matter- the honor of breast cancer survivors. Women who undergo mastectomy embark on a journey- one of survival, but also one of stigma, shame, and a change in their sense of sexuality. Young girls grow up with a constant barrage of images and behaviors that give them a false sense of what their adult identity and body image should be. As they mature into women, they have internalized stereotypical, degrading, and objectified examples of beauty, sexuality, and the "ideal" body presented to them in magazines, movies, celebrity behavior, porn, and locker room talk. When faced with a cancer diagnosis and surgical mutilation of their own breasts, women feel degraded when comparing themselves to those images, no longer seeing themselves as beautiful or desirable, if they ever really did. I wanted to create an image that conveys the message that our beauty is not defined by some ideal thrust on us by society, media, or men's objectification. We define it.