Erotic. Maternal. Cultural. Symbolic. Medical. What are breasts? How are they imagined? And who gets to decide?

Gabrielle M. Siegers obtained her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and German (University of Guelph), a Master of Arts in German (Queen's University) and a PhD in Molecular Immunology (Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology, University of Freiburg, Germany). Gabrielle trained at the Princess Margaret Hospital (Toronto), Robarts Research Institute and Western University (London, ON). Her research on gamma delta T cell immunotherapy for cancer includes studies in leukemia, prostate cancer, glioblastoma, breast and ovarian cancer. Gabrielle has given invited talks at scientific meetings in Canada, the United States and Germany. She is currently a research associate at the University of Alberta.

Dorothy Woodman is a contract instructor at the University of Alberta and Concordia University of Edmonton. Her research focuses on intersectional analysis of medial topics and themes in a variety of texts that include breast cancer representations, graphic memoirs and comic superheroes with cancer. Publications include “Enhancing Learning Cultures Through Inter-Disciplinarity: A Reading Group Pilot Project of Medicine and English Studies” with Tamar Rubin for Keeping Reflection Fresh: A Practical Guide for Clinical Educators; “Breast Reconstructive Surgery” and “Beauty Ideals, 20th-21st Century” for The Cultural Encyclopedia of the Breast; and “The Waiting,” a poem for Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. She is currently working with Reginald Wiebe on The Cancer Plot: Terminal Immortality in Marvel Comic’s Moral Universe, and with Reisa Klein on “When the Phallus is a ‘Dick’: The Cultural/Material Turn to Breasts” for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Culture.