Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 38

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Popular Culture Review

are far from privileged in “Breast Fest.” As is also the case in some other main
stream breast cancer cultural spaces (see Klawiter 2000), political anger, critique
of biomedicine or talk about fear, death and grief that might be important to women
with breast cancer are minimalized in favor of individualist empowerment and
prevention. And despite all the body talk, the invisibility of women with breast
cancer from this popular culture site allows it to distance itself from actual female
embodiment, reinforcing heteronormative and masculinist assumptions and de
sires which tend to emphasize not only beauty, but also rationality, individualism,
containment, and control.
Representations that seriously take into account women’s own represen
tations of breast cancer, especially those published “outside the popular media”
(Saywell et al 2000), would complicate these assumptions. Although as yet there
is little scholarship on women’s narratives of breast cancer in cyberspace, the last
ten years has seen a veritable explosion of texts written by breast cancer survivors
in both print publishing and on the Internet. Women have used autobiographical
narratives to negotiate with personal and the social meanings of cancer in relation
to the body, femininity, sexuality, and medicine. For instance, as Audre Lorde (1988)
has written, these narratives struggle with breast cancer as an isolating experience,
but also as a shared experience. The development of the notion of breast cancer
“sisterhood” accompanied the rise of breast cancer activism and has become more
visible in the past few years. The language of solidarity around survivorship is not
wholly absent in “Breast Fest,” but does stand in contrast to its highly individualist
promotion of female beauty and success. Further, autobiographical critiques of