Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 31
Breast Cancer Discourse in Cyberspace
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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