“I think about fucking you until erasing the boundary between the two of us.” C. Tangana.
Like so many other girls, I spent my adolescence hating my breasts. Small, pyramid-shaped instead of the coveted tennis balls that some of my friends developed overnight after returning from summer, and with a stretched nipple, my breasts appeared slowly, until one day I stopped feeling comfortable going to the neighborhood pool where we spent our summers wearing only the bottom of my bikini. But over the years, I don’t know whether because I had no choice, or because I understood that beauty is not synonymous with perfection, or perhaps because I was lucky that others liked them, I began to appreciate them, and I even liked them, in all their smallness. With motherhood, that pyramidal shape I had already accepted gave way to a firm, well-structured sphere, with a tucked-in nipple. It was one of the few good things motherhood brought to my body.
Standing in front of the Fuji mammography machine at the imaging labs in Polanco that I contacted a few days ago after realizing that it had been more than four months since my last follow-up, naked from the waist up, goosebumps from the unforgivable air that pours nonstop from several vents decorating the ceiling, the radiologist handles me carefully. “I’m going to touch you a little,” she says, and gently grabs my arm, which I leave limp like a rag doll’s. “It’s going to squeeze a bit,” she continues, but the truth is that this time the pressure on my breast is lighter than before, which instead of reassuring me makes me uneasy. Are they not getting all the tissue?
My breast flattened, face squashed against the transparent glass of the Fuji machine—there is no clearer example of what Karen Barad describes as a phenomenon in her philosophy of agential realism: an intra-action between the observing object and the observed object, where in this case the observing object is the mammography machine, and I am the observed object. But am I the observed object, or is it only my breast? I look at the machine-breast, and together—me as observer and the machine-breast as observed—we form another phenomenon, one of the many possible in that icy room.
My breast outside of me. I draw the outline of my body and leave my breast outside it. It is not the first time. Since my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time, I have been seriously considering the possibility of a preventive double mastectomy. In the kitchen I tell you that I feel the moment of the undesired operation approaching, because why wait for the inevitable—at least the highly probable—to arrive in order to do it. Thinking about the operation awakens certain doubts about my identity as a woman. “What do you mean?” you ask, somewhat unsettled, since talking about gender issues as applied to your loved ones—among whom I include myself—has always made you uncomfortable. I wonder—I don’t mean, I clarify—what is it that defines my body as a woman? What is the minimum necessary within the border I draw around myself that allows me to identify as a woman? Are my breasts necessary? In recent years I have witnessed through the detested social networks multiple transitions of women who decided to remove their breasts and who now identify as nonbinary, they/them. Women who stopped being women.
“Yes, but you don’t want that; you are a woman,” you remind me, your eyes a bit wider than normal, I don’t know whether from surprise or simply trying to communicate the obvious. What seems obvious to you. And yes, it is obvious that I am and will continue to be a woman. It is also obvious that (I think) I want to continue being one. But in this phase of my life, when I feel the need to play with borders, with the cuts between observing object and observed object, I savor the question by leaving it unresolved, even if only for a few days.
Unresolved questions. What in the past was a continuous, relentless search to resolve them has now become a futile exercise, less interesting than bathing in the question, unresolved, living in the tension it creates for me.
Nostalgia for the breasts I have not yet lost takes over me in the following days. When I shower, get dressed, lie down, I look for them with the tips of my fingers, I caress them tenderly, making sure they are still there, blindly tracing the outline of my body over and over again.
On Google I search for breast surgery. I want to understand why it is so difficult not to leave those two scars that look like two smiles and that cause me such sadness every time a trans man proudly displays his new flat chest. The VPN triggers an alert on Google, which wants to know if I am human. It shows me a picture of a bicycle in twelve squares and asks me to choose the ones that contain the vehicle. I mark them. It shows me another image of another bicycle. I mark the squares again, but this time I hesitate.
After showering with my six year old son, I look at myself in the mirror and wonder what breast size I will want. He looks at me. “Why are your boobs so small?” I launch into a dissertation about how different we all are from one another, like having green or blue eyes, and he looks at me unconvinced.
The next day, after drawing one of his seafloor landscapes and giving myself an octopus tattoo on my forearm with the same pen, Matteo lifts his shirt. “I want to draw myself two big boobs,” he tells me. “My love, why?” “I like it. I want to.” I think about the day when he will discover Judith Butler and argue to us that gender is not an inner identity that is expressed, but a repeated act, a practice that is socially configured. That bodies do not exist prior to discourse, but are materialized through normative frameworks. That the materiality of the body, then, is inseparable from the language that names and regulates it.
But for now I simply tell him that his boobs are beautiful just the way they are.
He pulls his shirt back down, disappointed. He has already begun to understand that being a woman is not something we like—at least not for him.
Cristina Escoda