the Female Body GOVERNING

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samantha king
As the players express their admiration for breast cancer survivors,
they also describe how their experiences at the race have inspired them
to “do more” for the cause. Gonzalez says it is something he might
“wanna do in the future,” while Anderson suggests that their participation
“might help make next year’s race bigger” and that it “hopefully
raised the awareness of what the Komen Foundation was trying to do.”
Hardy Nickerson points to the uplifting stories of survivorship as a motivation
to bring more people into the fi ght against breast cancer: “Cuz
the more you hear the stories, the more encouraged you get, and the
more encouraged you get, the more you’re able to encourage someone
else. That’s what life is all about.” Kordell Stewart, who describes his
mother’s battle with breast cancer and her living 10 years after diagnosis
instead of the one year predicted by her doctors, says, “It’s about these
people out here who are struggling with cancer and not knowing if
they’re gonna make it or not. But yet, if we come out here and just give
a helping hand they might get an extra year or so. You just don’t know
how strong the mind is.”
In tone and style—the sentimental, personal narratives, the soft
focus shots, the pink-and-white color scheme, the centrality of familial
relations, the uplifting music—the Real Men Wear Pink Campaign is in
many ways a typical breast cancer-related marketing effort. What makes
it a particularly interesting site for analysis, however, is that it condenses
a range of issues relating to gender and racial politics, survivorship,
corporate philanthropy, and the bright side of breast cancer.
The players who appear in these commercials, and whose participation
in philanthropic activity is represented by an endless stream of news
releases, on the one hand, their business—the NFL—and its social
values. But, as public fi gures whose profession has been inextricably
linked with inner-city criminality and violence through an unrelenting
racialized media discourse of the past decade, they also serve another
purpose (King, 2001). As exemplars of the “right side” of the NFL, they
represent a willingness to embrace bourgeois, humanistic values such
as the need to perform organized, charitable works and to transcend
the imagined space of dependence, sloth, and violence from which
they are said to have come. Indeed, the NFL responded to the negative
public attention it received as a result of the arrests of Ray Lewis and
Rae Carruth on separate charges of murder in the early months of
2000—attention that frequently cited welfare motherhood as a factor
in NFL players’ allegedly troubled lives—by focusing more heavily on its
philanthropic activities in public relations communications (King, 2001).
These commercials, therefore, have discursive effects that go beyond