Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 27

Breast Cancer Discourse in Cyberspace

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ment o f the power of the clinical gaze to define and control not only disease, but
subjects themselves. This is especially problematic for women, whose bodies have
historically been defined as Other in medical theory and practice, and who have
been subjected to not a little moralizing and normalizing. Abby Wilkerson, for
instance, describes how medicine ideologically conceptualizes the woman patient
as “selfless” as well as heterosexual, white, middle-class and able-bodied. Women
who depart from this nonn “may find themselves patronized, controlled, neglected,
punished, dehumanized, and even criminalized by the institution of medicine”
(1998: 14).
Specifically in relation to breast cancer, fem inist worries about
biomedicalization include not only the enormous implications of “pre-existing
conditions” for insurance companies who benefit financially from surveillance
techniques, but also the new burdens placed on women to prevent and manage
disease. Women’s identities become “spaces of illness potential” (Armstrong 1995:
402). The discovery of the “breast cancer gene,” for instance, has placed healthy
women in the agonizing position of debating mastectomies; these choices are un
doubtedly influenced by the current culture of risk prevention (Altman 1996). All
women, of course, are now encouraged to do breast self-exams and eventually to
get mammograms. As Jennifer Fosket (2000) and Laura Potts (2000) argue, this
not only promotes healthy women’s dependence on techno-science (and in
Foucault’s sense “disciplines” them) but also influences the experiences of women
who must negotiate living with the disease. Fosket and Potts employ Dorothy
Smith’s notion of bifurcated consciousness - a sense of the estrangement of one’s
own embodied knowledge in the face of the objectified knowledges of the public
sphere — to describe women’s experiences being subjugated by the dominance of
clinical, technical surveillance discourse of biomedicine.

Popular Culture and the Body
The characterization of biomedical discourse as dominating women’s
experiences of breast cancer is an important development in recent feminist criti
cism. However, these critiques need to be linked to feminist cultural studies, which
focus on the representation o f gender and the gendered body in culture.
Biomedicine’s dominance over breast cancer discourse, as in other women’s health
matters, depends upon popular culture, because popular culture spaces are now
primary pedagogical sites for circulating discourses about health, the body, and
gender.2 Beyond the clinic, cyberspace, films, magazines, television, and other
sites are purveyors of our culture of the body, which includes medical regimens
but also fashion, fitness, and multiple forms of body modification. These sites can
produce seductive metaphors and imaginaries of the healthful gendered body that
provide criteria for popular ideology, social hierarchies and nonnalization. For