the Female Body GOVERNING

Pink Ribbons Inc. 101
and few causes have been taken up so widely, or with so much success,
as breast cancer.
Over the past 10 years, upbeat and optimistic breast cancer campaigns
have become a central and integral part of the marketing strategy
of numerous corporations: American Airlines, Avon, Bally’s Total
Fitness, BMW, Bristol Myers Squibb, Charles Swab, Chili’s, Estée Lauder,
Ford Motor Company, General Electric, General Motors, Hallmark,
J. C. Penney, Kellogg’s, Lee Jeans, National Football League, Pier
One, Saks Fifth Avenue, Titleist, and Yoplait, among others, have
turned to breast cancer philanthropy as a new and profitable strategy
through which to market their products. Moreover, the nonprofit
and advocacy groups with which they have most frequently aligned
themselves—the now-defunct National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations
and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation—are
two of the largest, most high-profile arms of the U.S. breast cancer
movement.
In fact, the Komen Foundation is recognized as something of a
pioneer of cause-related marketing. In an oft-recited story, Nancy
Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation,
tells how she approached an executive of a lingerie manufacturer to
suggest that they include a tag in their bras reminding customers to
get regular mammograms. In response, the executive told Brinker,
“We sell glamour. We don’t sell fear. Breast cancer has nothing to do
with our customers” (Davidson, 1997, p. 36). The success of the Komen
Foundation in persuading businesses that breast cancer does have
something to do with their customers and that an affi liation with the
disease might actually encourage customers to buy their products is
illustrated by subsequent events.
Nancy Brinker is now recognized as the leading expert in causerelated
marketing and the Komen Foundation has more than a dozen
national sponsors, a Million Dollar Council comprised of businesses
that donate at least $1 million per year, and a slew of other corporate
partnerships at both the local and national levels (Davidson, 1997). They
even have a contract with a lingerie company—Walcoal—to manufacture
an “awareness bra.” 10
In April 1999 the National Football League (NFL) became the latest
corporation to sign on as a national sponsor of the Komen Foundation’s
Race for the Cure. 11 This arrangement—which partners a professional
sports league that is the epitome of American hypermasculinity with
a nonprofit group that is the epitome of pink-ribbon hyperfemininity—brought
with it an immediate guarantee of differentiation and
recognition. The announcement of the new partnership coincided with