the Female Body GOVERNING

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consent of the patient, is also widely acknowledged as a turning point in
the history of the disease (Brenner, 2000; Ehrenreich, 2001; Klawiter,
2000; Lerner 2001). Kushner’s exposé prompted a decade of nationwide
campaigning for informed consent legislation at the state level, and as
activist and advocacy groups sprung up around the country, a national
movement began to emerge.
Through a variety of research techniques (journalistic and academic)
and disciplinary foci, authors such as Roberta Altman (1996), Sharon
Batt (1994), Barbara Brenner (2000), Maren Klawiter (2000), Ellen
Leopold (1999a, Barron Lerner (2001), Alisa Solomon (1992), and
Carole Stabiner (1997) trace the consolidation of this movement into
an effective political force. These authors view the founding of the
National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations (NABCO) in 1986 and
the creation of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC) fi ve years
later as central to this process. 2 As a result of NBCC campaigning, in
particular, federal government funding for breast cancer has increased
dramatically (from $40 million in 1981, to $407 million in 1993, to
$605 million in 2005), and breast cancer activists now enjoy a more
active role in research funding decision processes and in research
agenda setting.
Maren Klawiter (2000) offers one of the most compelling accounts
of this history, making visible the connections between changes in
the medical management of breast cancer, the destigmatization of the
disease, and the growth of activism. She shows how a multiplication
of treatment regimens, a proliferation of support groups, and the
expansion of screening into asymptomatic populations during the
1980s and 1990s helped produce new social spaces, solidarities, and
sensibilities among breast cancer survivors and activists. In other words,
changes in the treatment of women by the medical profession—changes
preceded by fledgling activism—opened up numerous spaces in which
women could talk openly about their experiences of the disease with
one another, thus enabling the emergence of a multifaceted breast
cancer movement.
This chapter builds on these analyses by tracing the materialization
of the “breast cancer survivor” as a category of identifi cation by focusing
in particular on a hitherto neglected but absolutely central force in
the emergence of the breast cancer movement: the role of corporate
philanthropy. 3 More specifi cally, it explores how breast cancer-directed
corporate philanthropy has shaped the emergence of the breast cancer
survivor as a category of identifi cation and the effects of this confi guration
on the ways that the “problem of breast cancer” is understood and
responded to.