the Female Body GOVERNING

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samantha king
The absence of analyses of the role of philanthropy in literature on
the breast cancer movement can be explained in part by an understandable
commitment on the part of breast cancer scholars to focus on the
resistive strategies of grassroots activism and to chart substantive changes
in the funding and regulation of breast cancer research, screening,
and treatment. So while most researchers have included fund-raising
organizations such as the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
in their accounts of breast cancer activism and have often been critical
of the mainstream and corporate-friendly politics of such organizations
(Batt, 1994; Brenner, 2000), they have not tended to explore how the
discourses and practices of individual and corporate philanthropy
per se have functioned in terms of the movement’s public profi le and
persuasive power.
A complete picture would thus acknowledge that breast cancer
foundations, nonprofi t organizations, and fund-raising events have
proliferated in the last two decades; that breast cancer research is a—if
not the—favorite charitable cause for corporations seeking to attract
female consumers through cause-related marketing campaigns; and
that philanthropic approaches to the disease have even become part
of federal and state health policy (through the introduction of the
breast cancer fund-raising stamp and breast cancer research tax check
offs, for example). It would also recognize that organizations such as
the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (the world’s largest
nonprofi t funder of breast cancer research) have played a central role in
breast cancer policy making; raised millions of dollars for research; and
offered what are among the most visible and accessible modes of breast
cancer activism—in the case of the Komen Foundation, the Race for
the Cure and numerous cause-related marketing campaigns 4 —currently
in circulation. Indeed, although the conceptualization of breast cancer
as a political issue has not dropped out of public circulation in the
same way that residual discourses of stigmatization have not been
entirely displaced, in popular discourse the fi ght against the disease is
now constituted predominantly as a fi ght that does—and should—take
place on the terrain of science and medicine funded through corporate
philanthropy. An analysis of breast cancer-directed corporate
philanthropy—and of the Race for the Cure and breast cancer–related
marketing in particular—is thus crucial to a fuller understanding of the
cultural appeal of breast cancer as an issue for public concern in the
present moment and to identifying those “realities of life” or threats to
the status quo that are obscured by the widespread determination to
look only on the bright side of the disease (Lorde, 1980, p. 75).