the Female Body GOVERNING

Pink Ribbons Inc. 105
the realm of breast cancer to help produce and reproduce a racialized
discourse of generosity that characterizes U.S. culture at this time.
While these commercials offer a model for the ideal practitioner of
American generosity, they also give shape to an idealized recipient of
such generosity. The breast cancer survivors who appear in the NFL
commercials are ordained with an inherent morality and wisdom—
indeed, the awestruck voiceovers of the players in conjunction with the
soft focus frames of the survivors faces suggest beatifi cation—and are
thus confi gured as higher-order citizens. But, perhaps paradoxically,
the discourse of survivorship deployed through these commercials
is also infantilizing. In her attempt to understand the popularity of
stuffed bears and other commodities more commonly associated with
childhood as gifts with a breast cancer theme, Barbara Ehrenreich
(2001) wonders if in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology,
“femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood—a state
of arrested development.” “Certainly,” she writes, “men diagnosed with
prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars” (p. 46). Here
Ehrenreich identifi es (although she doesn’t elaborate on) what I think
is a key tension in mainstream breast cancer survivor culture: On the
one hand breast cancer survivors are celebrated for their courage and
strength and urged to feel empowered as actors within the medical
system, but on the other they are asked to submit to mainstream scientifi
c knowledge and depend on doctors and scientists to protect them
from death. They—and the public at large—are told to obtain regular
screenings, to demand insurance coverage for mammograms, and to
explore a range of treatment options, but they are discouraged from
questioning the underlying structures and guiding assumptions of the
cancer-industrial complex.
While some feminist voices do raise such questions—What does cause
breast cancer if only 30% of women diagnosed have known risk factors?
If mammography, chemotherapy, and radiation have not succeeded
in bringing down morality rates, what might? Why are more efforts
not made to fund research into cause and prevention and particularly
environmental factors in breast cancer incidence?—these voices, as I
have indicated, are largely excluded from the mainstream of breast
cancer culture. And while research on women’s experiences with breast
cancer suggests a wide range of psychological responses to the disease
(in other words, the dominant image of breast cancer as the route to
true happiness is not borne out by the research) the heterogeneity of
these experiences does not easily penetrate dominant discourse on the
disease and the approach of the cancer establishment to it.