Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 39
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
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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.