On Nancy’s Husband George: Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer

Abstract

The feminist memoirist is ever conscious of the dialogic relationship between herself and the men in her life, ever negotiating the dynamics that arise from a combination of the particulars of private life and the vestiges of patriarchal systems. In Nancy Mairs’s oeuvre, some of these dynamics are revealed in the “unspeakable,” the telling absence of a full depiction of her husband, George; other dynamics are exposed when the repressed becomes “speakable,” when she re-imagines herself and in turn finds she must also reinvent George. This is a task that is both facilitated and complicated by George’s cancer and subsequent impotence, as well as by his confession to a longterm extramarital affair. George’s depiction complements Mairs’s own self-reinvention; whereas studying Mairs’s feminist self-construction leads to insights about women’s embodied experiences, probing her portrayal of George produces equally useful awareness of feminist models of male disabled experience.