the Female Body GOVERNING

96
samantha king
At the National Race for the Cure, thousands of participants lined up
and fi led slowly into the survivors’ tent—its entrance marked by a metal
archway festooned with bright pink balloons—to enjoy a “survivors’
breakfast” from the various corporate sponsors. The breakfast was
followed, at 7:30 a.m., by the 10-Star Salute to Survivors’ Parade (a
feature that is common to all Race for the Cure events) and the prerace
rally.
Led by Komen Foundation founder Nancy Brinker, thousands of
breast cancer survivors (all sporting bright pink visors and t-shirts to
distinguish themselves from other participants) marched down from
the tent toward the main stage. Clapping and dancing to the words
and music of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” they moved along a
pathway lined on either side by a cheering crowd of thousands, and
the National Mall was transformed into an immense sea of pink and
white. As the music grew louder and the clapping more vigorous, this
group of predominantly middle-aged White women took their place
on the stage, their arms outstretched in the air, waving in time with
the music.
Following a mass recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, Priscilla Mack,
co-chair of the race, introduced the survivors to the crowd, “I am very
proud to be surrounded by a sea of faith. Each survivor has to dig down
deep and fi ght for her life. We applaud you and we stand behind you.”
Mack then proceeded to ask women who had survived breast cancer for
30 years or more to wave their hands and “be recognized.” A handful
of women raised their hands. As she counted down through the years
until she reached one, the hands increased in number.
Standing close to the stage, I could not help but recall Audre Lorde’s
(1980) well-known entry in the Cancer Journals when she points to
“socially sanctioned prosthesis” as “another way of keeping women with
breast cancer silent and separate from each other” (p. 16). Lorde then
asks, “What would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended
upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored
hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?” (p. 16). Here was an army of
postmastectomy/lumpectomy women, assembled in the nation’s capital,
but surely not in a way that Lorde imagined.
This was an intensely moving moment, both for the survivors on the
stage and the crowds on the mall, many of whom wore signs on their
backs with the names of loved ones who had survived or died from breast
cancer. For some women on the stage it was the fi rst time that they had
publicly declared their identity as breast cancer survivors (one of my
interviewees told me that it had taken her two years to pluck up the
courage to attend the race as a survivor). For others, the race marked