Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 26
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Popular Culture Review
terests and is interimplicated with broader messages about gender and the body.11
begin by briefly introducing biomedicine and popular culture as sources of women’s
health information that, from a feminist perspective, are not innocent of relations
of power. I then describe in detail Women.com’s “BreastFest 2000,” which circu
lates a hybrid language of consumerist, biomedical and feminist discourses and
applies them to breast cancer strategies. I suggest that the site is disciplinary in its
promotion o f women’s health and body management. It affirms imaginaries of the
heterofeminine female body, while symbolically erasing some realities of breast
cancer that challenge this ideal.
Feminist Critiques of Biomedicine
Inspired by the Women’s Health Movement that began in the 1970s but
also more recently by health radicalism since AIDS, feminist scholarship on breast
cancer has criticized several aspects of medicine’s treatment of women. These
include the historical neglect of women and members of oppressed groups by the
health-care industries, the ideological nature of medicine’s approach to gender and
sexuality, and biomedicine’s suppression of women’s own embodied knowledges.
The feminist critique of biomedicine has been driven in part by a concern with the
apparent gulf between biomedical (meaning techno-scientific medical) approaches
and women’s embodied experiences. Most obviously, biomedicine long used the
male body as its standard, thereby neglecting to view women’s health concerns as
central. On this fr