Peggy Kyoungwon Lee (she/they) is a scholar and writer of fiction and creative non-fiction. They are Assistant Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Disability Studies and Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University. She is a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Lambda Literary, Hub City Writers Project, and past alum of the Tin House and Kenyon Review summer workshops.
Writing After Breast Cancer
As a fellow, I will complete Chapter 3 of my first book, Unflinching: Politics of Racial Composure, which examines Korean American writer Katherine Min’s fiction and nonfiction written after her breast cancer diagnosis—work that inspired the book’s namesake title. The chapter examines creative capacity in the face of illness and death, specifically analyzing Min’s last novel and series of essays which she wrote after diagnosis in 2014, deciding swiftly at the oncologist’s office that she would stop writing fiction—her “capacity for pure imagining,” admittedly overwhelmed. The fellowship also supports early development of a related anthology project centered on narratives from the AAPI community, with particular attention to queer, trans, and non-binary experiences of breast and chest cancer. Drawing on my own cancer journey that began in 2021, I am motivated by the alarming rise in breast cancer diagnoses for Asian American and Pacific Islander people under fifty between 2000 through 2021. In my creative-critical essay, I explore how the concept of the “alimentary bind,” or the persisting representational trope of Asian women and supposed endemic diets, particularly in the East/West estrogenic and histrionic diet discourse, like “soy feminization” to red meat, limits the cultural imagining of carcinogenesis within feminized Asian bodies to individual choice, rather than a political disease structured by the inflammatory harms and afterlives of racial capitalism, colonialism, racism, and war. More broadly, the anthology, envisioned as the first resource of its kind, aims to forge intergenerational connections across creative, academic, activist communities, and to catalyze new conversations about Asian American unwellness in campus and public life.