Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 31

Breast Cancer Discourse in Cyberspace 27 ultimately reveals its message as promoting mammography. The specter of breast cancer arrives in the song’s bridge describing breasts as symbolic sites of female success: Fashion-leader, dream-seeder, Mother-breeder, baby-feeder, Sweater-filler, eye-thriller, Money-maker, heart-breaker, Big, small or in the middle, doesn’t matter, give a little Lovin’ care to your own breasts - get that all-important test...Check ‘em, ladies! Along with being told to “summon up confidence” when facing sexism, women are asked to take care of their breasts through mammography. In both cases, women are presented with the responsibility of self-protection and self-defense. Being proactive and responsible is linked to women’s success with money, romance, beauty, and motherhood. Women’s healthy, well-tended, protected bodies are pre sented as sites of heterofeminine power — they are fashionable and thrilling to look at, they break hearts and feed babies and sow dreams, not to mention that they also have earning power. The liberal feminist emphasis on female equality, self-advocacy and suc cess echoes the language promoted by some mainstream treatment-focused breast cancer groups. As Maren Klawiter describes (2000), the language of individual empowerment currently has a large voice in the breast cancer movement. The Su san G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation promoted by “Breast Fest,” for instance, is a pioneer in breast cancer research advocacy and promotes the widely visible, corporate-sponsored Race for the Cure events. While enormously successful in raising funds for women’s health research, Klawiter suggests that its discourse of individual responsibility reflects its “privileged social, medical and cultural loca tion of a predominantly white and middle-class constituency.” It presents early detection as an individual responsibility and places its hope in “individual con trol... and in the steady progress of science and medicine” (2000: 74-75). In con trast, other groups, influenced by AIDS, lesbian and gay, and environmental activ ism, depict breast cancer as deeply political and social, linked to issues of environ mental justice, inequality, and corporate profit.4 Given its silence on critical environmental and social issues, its emphasis on early detection, and its construction of its audience as healthy, heterofeminine, and middle-class, “Breast Fest” can be seen as aligning itself with a particular ideology of breast cancer, one that views women as individually responsible for and capable of ensuring their social status and well-being. One assumption im plicit here is that women have little in their way but sexist attitudes and self-doubt, both of which can be combated through self-advocacy and self-care. Another as