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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ TRIAL BY MOUNTAIN: SUFFERING AND HEALING IN DIFFICULT LANDSCAPES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS with an emphasis in FEMINIST STUDIES by Lindsey Collins March 2012 The Dissertation of Lindsey Collins is approved: _______________________________ Professor Donna Haraway, Chair _______________________________ Professor James Clifford _______________________________ Professor Kimberly Lau _______________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Lindsey Collins 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One Mountains: A Topography 21 Chapter Two Wilderness Therapy and the Making of a Slow Wilderness 55 Chapter Three Of Mountains and Malls: Ecologies of Cancer Activism 96 Chapter Four Oncogeographies: Living at the Crux 150 Conclusion 195 Bibliography 210 iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. HERA Foundation Poster, 2009 5 2. The Livestrong Foundation, “Driven” 126-127 3. “With Every Pedal Stroke Cancer Loses”: Nike’s Chalkbot 130 4. Climb Against the Odds, 2009 144 iv ABSTRACT Lindsey Collins Trial by Mountain: Suffering and Healing in Difficult Landscapes This dissertation addresses the intersection of illness and landscape in metaphors of climbing mountains and cancer. In recovery climbs, events held to raise money and awareness for women’s cancers, climbing mountain peaks and summits figures as a journey similar to a struggle with cancer. For these metaphors to be intelligible as healing and hopeful requires the Euro-American histories of investing in mountains as wild, consecrated, risky places. To understand the development of recovery climbs, which began in the late 1990s, I first contextualize Western women’s climbing within a larger mountaineering history in which men are the dominant players. By paying attention to the gendered dimensions of mountaineering beginning in the nineteenth century but focusing on the last several decades, I describe what kinds of shifts have taken place in the last 30 years to make recovery climbs possible. I then describe the development of wilderness therapy in the 1990s. A feminist and still-growing therapeutic model, wilderness therapy creates what I call a slow wilderness, in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity. These climbing practices go beyond metaphor. I argue that recovery climbers actively make permeable bodies and landscapes through their interactions. I examine v several different models of contemporary cancer activism to argue that these different organizations’ embodied practices matter and create ecologies, some of which are more life-sustaining, just, and productive for understanding illness than others. Finally, I follow events organized by The Breast Cancer Fund and The HERA Women’s Cancer Foundation to explore the ways that metaphors of rocks and climbing inform people’s experiences of cancer and trauma. I use lines, problems, horizons, and pressure as tropes that provide a materially embodied way of engaging cancer climbs. My phenomenological account, informed by queer theory, argues that recovery climbs are embodied practices of resilience and interrelation. I propose oncogeographies as a different ecological model in which we might better relate to illness by working with the limits and obstacles that illness brings, rather than repudiating them in favor of survivorship narratives. vi For Adele Cagle, my grandmother vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS So many people’s kindness has helped me complete this dissertation. Thanks, first and foremost, to the activists and climbers who have shared their work, thoughts, and even their homes with me: Tonya Riggs Clement, Ted Handwerk, Cindy Gagnon, the staff of the HERA Foundation and The Breast Cancer Fund, Barbara Brenner, and the amazing, supportive, and brilliant staff and board members of Breast Cancer Action. Thanks to my family, Susan Collins, Jim Collins, and Chris Collins, for their love and support, and helping me keep things in perspective, and to my other family, Sarah Sturdy, Lara Rogers, Karyn Tomlin, and Jessica Harbeck, for periodically taking over my house and surfing with and feeding me, especially in the uncertain climate of graduate funding. Raoul Birnbaum, Scout Calvert, Rachel Churner, Kate Cowley, Rebecca Dolinsky, Jane Garrity, Ann Hadley, Karen Jacobs, Lochlann Jain, Ashley Jett, Lindsay Kelly, Eben Kirksey, Sandra Koelle, Isabel Ledesma, John Marlovits, Matt Moore, Suzanne Nicholas, Jessica O’Reilly, Mike Rasalan, Rebecca Schein, Lee Sheets and Bettina Stoetzer have been excellent readers, listeners, morale-boosters, and friends over the last several years. Kate Coffie deserves appreciation that could take up an entire page. Thank you for tirelessly reading every word, for making the last few months livable, and for the hundreds of small and big ways you’ve smoothed over the very rough edges of this whole process. Without you, I wouldn’t be writing these acknowledgements at all. viii I cannot imagine a better committee than Donna Haraway, Jim Clifford, and Kim Lau. I feel incredibly lucky to have landed in the History of Consciousness program under Donna and Jim’s guidance, and am deeply indebted to and inspired by their intellectual and personal generosity. The things they have taught me have shaped my life in innumerable ways. Finally, I have deep gratitude for the work of History of Consciousness Department Managers Anne Spalliero, Sheila Peuse, Melanie Wylie, and Cheryl Van De Veer. Just knowing you exist has been so reassuring. Thank you for being all of our champions. Thank you to the Department of History of Consciousness, the UCSC Humanities Division, and the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research for providing funding for this project. ix INTRODUCTION In “On Being Ill” (1930), Virginia Woolf pondered the absence of sickness, or the “daily drama of the body,” as a great literary theme, Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness. (195) For Woolf, illness is an emergence of new landscapes, the discovery of “wastes and deserts” and “obdurate oaks,” more so than a mere subtraction from or attenuation of life. The uprooting, destructive capabilities of illness do not diminish its powers to generate new geographies. This dissertation grapples with the knotted, tangled relations between sickness and landscapes. Woolf’s landscapes of sickness are metaphoric, in one sense, as are the persistent narratives of cancer in terms of rocks and mountains, and ascending mountains in terms of cancer, in climbs organized to cope with the disease. But in another sense, Woolf’s landscapes are not metaphors. They gesture to different states of being that are quite real to the sick person, but, Woolf argues, due to the poverty of language to express illness, these landscapes remain untranslatable to the world of the healthy. Similarly, for people climbing with and against cancer, stories of rocks and illness are not just metaphors to bridge the gulf between sickness and health. In the worlds I describe, healing and sickness and inner, human and outer, non-human landscapes embrace one another to the point at which they become almost indistinguishable. The connective tissues between 1 landscapes and sickness are themselves alive and generative. “Metaphor” isn’t quite the right term to describe these relationships. Two scenes of cancer and what I call “difficult landscapes” provide a way into these geographies. Dr. Jerri Nielsen, an American physician who decided to work at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica to cope with a protracted, bitter divorce and custody battle, got breast cancer in the dead of the Antarctic winter. Without any other medical help or adequate medical supplies, or a way to get help in or Nielsen out of Antarctica, Nielsen became the object of media attention in 1998 when she had to perform her own biopsy and give herself chemotherapy treatments. Suddenly, the world of Antarctic extremes that had been the basis of her new life and self became the landscape of her imminent death. In her story, the icy landscape is an intimate part of her cancer itself. As her chemo starts to produce side effects, she writes, "Everywhere I went, I felt like I was walking through neck-deep Jell-O…It was getting hard to tell the difference between fatigue caused by the chemo and what was normal for the Pole at this time of year… Along with the effects of sensory deprivation, we were experiencing physiologic altitudes of more than eleven thousand feet for days at a time… The sensory deprivation and chronic hypoxia were also affecting our vision, and our tempers" (303). But Antarctica’s role as healer, rectifier of wrongs, and terra nullius where one can begin anew isn’t suddenly reversed upon Nielsen’s cancer diagnosis; Antarctica doesn’t become an oppressor. Instead, it becomes an intensified version of itself, an agent of healing with a deadly edge. The Antarctic landscape, like cancer, by virtue of its ability to kill, becomes imbued with 2 meaning that draws Nielsen’s ailing, human body and the icy, fierce winter landscape into a closer embrace. Nielsen writes, "Every small breath was a triumph against nothingness. You were forced to recreate yourself again and again or risk being swallowed in the emptiness, and to do that you had to know what you were made of.” The landscape’s ferocity and chemotherapy produce similar effects in Nielsen’s body. How does one distinguish between inner and outer landscapes anymore in an environment like this? Nielsen continues, “The route to the Pole was, after all, an inner journey.