Transforming Silence into Narrative: Race, Breast Cancer, and Medical Imaging

This article examines medical imaging, including mammography, and its potential to obscure racialized structures of visibility, risk, and exclusion that hinder the full benefits of technological innovation. As AI applications are used to innovate medical imaging for breast cancer, these applications are based on training datasets that reflect White women's bodies and health experiences. This article argues that medical imaging technologies and the data infrastructures on which they rely do not merely fail to represent racial differences; they actively participate in the construction of what becomes medically visible or intelligible. By analyzing The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light and Other Essays (1988) by Audre Lorde, this research considers the relationships between race, the body, medical surveillance, and technological influence. Lorde's narrative account of her struggle with breast and liver cancer, marked by her refusal to dissociate her body from her illness, provides a critical lens through which to question the presumed neutrality of medical imaging technologies.