Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Being the skeptic that I am, I have never gotten too into the breast cancer awareness stuff. This month, I have gotten just downright annoyed. It was during a plane ride, when my beverage service was infringed upon by a breast cancer donation collection, that I decided that things have gone too far. Consequently, I felt quite vindicated by this recent On Point episode.

Not only have I argued that foundations (and this includes cancer research foundations) are essentially tax shelters for corporations/businessmen who want to build a positive reputation for themselves, and certainly the pink ribbon gimmick benefits corporations more than anybody, but I am also troubled by the way that these breast cancer awareness campaigns shape notions of gender and femininity.

Why is it that women's health has come to be represented by a disease that affects the breasts? Breast cancer is not the biggest health threat for women. Is it because we reduce our concern for women's bodies to their reproductive organs/capacities... is the idea of a woman losing her breasts (as opposed, say, to a liver or a kidney) that much more disturbing because it is transgressive of our image of womanhood?

And why the pink? To enforce the perception that breast cancer is inherently "feminine"?

That brings me to another point of contention, which is the whole concept of "women's health" and "women's issues." Yes, there are certain ways in which most females' bodies differ from most males'. (But even here the difference is not actually discrete. When it comes to biological sex, the reality is more complicated than our binary categories of male-female would lead us to believe.) Perhaps, even, the organs that one does or does not have can determine the types of afflictions to which one is susceptible. (On this account, it is important to note that men can and do get breast cancer; it is not only a women's disease.) All this means, though, is that you won't get prostate cancer if you don't have a prostate gland. It does not mean that the general conditions - social, economic, political, biological - that predispose certain people to certain types disease - are actually gender specific.

In other words, the focus on "women's health" locates the cause of specific forms of female suffering within the female body itself. It is women's own bodies - specifically the parts that are marked as feminine - that bear the responsibility for affliction.

Women suffer because they have breasts.

Nowhere in these "women's health" and breast cancer awareness campaigns is any attention paid to whether or not women have equal access to healthcare; whether they receive the same treatment/respect by health professionals (in terms of their personal ability to act and make decisions; the assignment of moral culpability; the risks that are taken; and the expectations as to their ability to cope and recover); or how social norms and gender stereotypes may affect women's attitudes toward their own bodies and health. Just examples.

When I see pink ribbons on products, I see coporations yet again exploiting women for profit.