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35 Breast Cancer Discourse in Cyberspace successfully healthy female consumer, they ultimately promote the symbolic era sure of women’s ill bodies. Queens College, CUNY Victoria L. Pitts Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Further, as Anthony Giddens (1991) argues, managing the body is now a primary method o f managing the self, and so I would argue that women’s processes o f self- identity are now becoming pressured with the management o f breast cancer risk. The prevention/early detection strategies o f biomedicine in relation to breast cancer mean that it must recruit and convince subjects without symptoms; it must operate like other less respected sectors like cosmetic surgery that use popular culture as a market ing vehicle. The site was advertised to CompuServe subscribers on its home page and is copy righted (2000) by CompuServe. In San Francisco, for instance, the Bay Area Women and Cancer Project focuses on outreach to marginalized groups deprived o f access to health care, and the Toxic Links Coalition targets multinational corporations (including Zeneca) that have profited by “causing cancer on the one hand [by producing carcinogens] and detecting it and treat ing it on the other” (Klawiter, 2000: 82). However, depicting biomedical discourse as emanating from and existing in separate spheres than wom en’s everyday embodied experiences, as Dorothy Smith’s model o f bifurcated consciousness would have it, belies the fact that popular culture is saturated with its messages. They describe sexualized and erotic images o f (healthy) breasts in breast cancer re porting in newspapers and magazines, the overrepresentation o f young women's bod ies in such accounts, the invisibility o f mastectomies in media representations o f breast cancer, and an overemphasis on breast cancer’s impact on women’s sexuality or attrac tiveness. Women are asked their age as well as psychology-minded questions, such as: Are you a perfectionist?; Are you trying to improve your relationships through surgery?; How many procedures do you want?; For how long have you considered surgery?; and Did your surgeon[s] ask for a psychological evaluation o f your mental health? Works Cited Acker, Kathy. “The Gift o f Disease,” The Guardian (18 January 1997). Altman, Roberta. Waking Up/Fighting Back: the Politics o f Breast Cancer. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996. Armstrong, David. “The Rise o f Surveillance Medicine,” Sociology' o f Health and Illness 17.3 (1995): 393-404. Clarke, Adele and Virginia Olesen, eds. Revisioning Women, Health and Healing. New York: Routledge, 1999. Croteau, David and William Hoynes. Media Society’: Industries, Images and Audiences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000.