Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 25

Popular Pedagogies, Illness
and the Gendered Body:
Reading Breast Cancer Discourse
in Cyberspace
As Marilyn Yalom’s recent history of the breast argues, Western cultural
representations of breasts have long been saturated with heterofeminine symbol
ism. Breasts have been depicted for centuries as belonging to others - nursing
babies, for instance, and desiring men. In the 20th-century, things only got worse.
The “commercial assaults” of popular culture, Yalom argues, have spread harmful
beauty norms and encouraged a cultural obsession with “perfecting” the female
body according to such norms. Yalom’s analysis ends with the breast cancer epi
demic, the tragedy of which she hopes has finally prompted a re-thinking of breast
meanings:
Today, it is the tragic reality of breast cancer that is bringing
women into full possession of their breasts. They’re learning,
with the shock of life-threatening illness, that their breasts re
ally are their own. (1997: 276)
Yet, even though the epidemic of breast cancer has provoked women’s
breast reclaiming in the form of art, advocacy, and activism, it has also provided
new opportunities for the disciplining and commercialization of women’s bodies.
Recent feminist scholarship has worried about the increasing power of biomedi
cine to govern the female body. Feminist critiques describe biomedicine as a pow
erful, ideological and masculinist discourse that suppresses women’s embodied
knowledges and disciplines their bodies. The medicalization of the breast, how
ever, should not be seen as “effacing] the breast’s erotic and maternal meanings”
(Yalom 1997: 278). I argue that the language of medicalization can be circulated
through popular culture in a way that contributes to, rather than effaces, the
heterofeminization of the female body.
In this article, I analyze breast cancer discourse in a popular culture site.
Popular culture spaces often constitute pedagogical sites where women receive
messages about breast cancer, health, gender and the body. My interest is in how
popular pedagogies circulate both biomedical and consumerist aims and strategies
related to women’s embodiment. I argue that in the breast cancer web site 1 ana
lyze, breast cancer discourse is informed by both biomedical and commercial in-