Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6210

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Lippman A.
Breast cancer: the personal and the political
Globeandmail.com 2006 Oct 7
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061007.BKPINK07/TPStory/?query=breast+cancer

Full text:

Not so long ago, had I used the terms breast cancer and product placement in the same paragraph, eyebrows would likely have been raised in puzzlement. Not so today: The linkage is obvious, especially this month. It’s October, and almost as prevalent as the vivid reds and oranges of the falling leaves are the omnipresent pink ribbons on clothing, jewellery, water bottles, even stuffed animal toys. Yes, it’s breast cancer month again, actually breast cancer “awareness” month, and even a less cynical person than I might wonder if the publication of this review now is itself a “product placement,” orchestrated to capitalize on the ever-growing commercialization of this still-serious disease.

Of the books under review, Pink Ribbons, Inc. is probably the most explicit — and the most informative — in clarifying all that is done to make us “aware” of breast cancer and why this condition alone, and not autism, learning disabilities awareness, child abuse prevention or eye health, all of which also have October as “their” month according to a Health Canada website, grabs headlines — and sells specially coloured ribbons and runner wristbands.

Samantha King’s relatively short but densely packed book clarifies how beyond being an all-too-frequent and still-too-lethal disease for many women, breast cancer is a corporate dream come true. In tracing the “politics of philanthropy,” King — who teaches health studies at Queen’s University — highlights how individual consumption (of things to raise funds “for the cure”) diverts attention from the political participation needed if this disease is to be prevented. In detail, she explores what she calls the emergence of “consumer-oriented breast cancer activism,” and its implications for individual women and for society. In other words, of why awareness downstream has perhaps trumped doing something preventive upstream.

In her social-political analysis of breast cancer, King covers territory others have already examined (e.g., the Susan Komen Foundation sponsored — and copyrighted — run “for the cure”; the displacement of activism for policy change to fundraising for research into new treatments; the growth of the “cause-marketing” business, etc.). But she adds a new emphasis: the degree to which corporate philanthropy and the “market for generosity” have contributed to reshaping breast cancer away from being a hidden, highly stigmatized disease.

And the evidence King provides, including a five-page table outlining the Avon Corp.‘s own involvement in marketing breast cancer causes as energetically as it sells cosmetics, is compelling and convincing: Clearly, philanthropy is no longer — if it ever was — merely a sign of corporations exhibiting social responsibility or good “citizenship.” Rather, it has become a business opportunity, whether a company (or its foundations) makes outright donations to a breast cancer organization (thereby earning tax credits in Canada ) or sells some pink-ribbon/breast cancer-associated product (thereby making straightforward profits). While the donations, and the sales, are substantially higher in the United States , where King focuses her analysis, the same things are happening on a somewhat smaller scale here.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. follows in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 article, Welcome to Cancerland, and Sharon Batt’s 1994 classic, Patient No More, in looking at the system that supports breast cancer. King’s addition to this literature on the roles of neo-liberalism and commercialization in shaping how the disease is approached is more academic than these earlier works, but still accessible — and useful.

Quite different, from it — and from each other — are Undefeated, by Marsha Hunt, and My Life in the Balance, by Marla Shapiro, both of which seem to fit into the personal-journey genre of breast cancer writing. Unfortunately, Hunt’s contribution, unlike Shapiro’s, doesn’t really add much to this category.

The standard against which I assess “journeys” is a tough one, and anyone who has read Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals will know why. Lorde used the story of her experiences with and of breast cancer to make us think or act differently about this disease, with activism, not inspiration, her probable objective. With her indelible words always in mind, my cool response to Hunt’s book is not surprising. I accept that she’s not the great writer Lorde was; few are. But it was difficult to retain interest in her story, one with so little relevance for most, and at times I felt I was reading some too-long article in a popular entertainment magazine.

Thus, only those very curious about a slice of the life of this mother of Mick Jagger’s first child may want to plow through this name-dropping account of how “cancer’s been a wonderful experience for me. . . . One of the best experiences I’ve had.” This is a pity, especially when Hunt could have used the lenses provided by her being black to deepen what we know of the experience of breast cancer for marginalized women. This, the book she didn’t write, would have added significantly to the journey genre. Instead, we get pages about her multiple connections to the worlds of money and medicine and the protections they provided her from diagnosis through treatment.

Marla Shapiro has arguably even more and better connections than Hunt, but she also has writing talent, an excellent way with words, and a helpful story to tell. (Readers of her Globe columns on health will likely already be familiar with her chatty, informative style.) She too writes explicitly of her “journey with breast cancer,” and she also names names (with an index to the book listing the pages on which one can find specific family members and friends). But she does so in ways that encourage the reader to accompany her as she goes from physician ministering to others to patient needing ministering herself, seeking to find some “balance.”

This doesn’t mean Shapiro transforms her story into action of some kind for the rest of us — women living with a diagnosis of breast cancer or those not yet so labelled — but at least she holds a reader’s attention: We want to know this story. And, physician that she is, Shapiro does look beyond her own body, using it to yield multiple informative and sensible insights into the disease and its physical and social effects on women.

Shapiro and Hunt make it clear that having resources and privileges — and dedicated friends, especially one who’s a professional cook — really helps when one gets a breast cancer diagnosis. By contrast, King makes it clear that buying or wearing some pink-ribbon festooned product may do much less good — may even cause harm — when these activities sideline attention to the systemic and structural factors that shape the frequency and distribution of the disease.

So, while there is much in Life in the Balance that addresses wisely the myriad questions confronted by women, and friends of women, with breast cancer, Pink Ribbons, Inc. needs a place on the journey, too: Breast cancer is as much about the machinations of commerce and the failings of society as it is about the mechanisms of biology and the failings of the body’s defences against cellular change and damage. Would that our efforts to detect lumps were matched by vigilance to detect the commercialization of women’s health and the harmful effects of the growing consumer and corporate philanthropy that displaces political and societal solutions to social problems.

Abby Lippman follows the politics of breast cancer as a member of Breast Cancer Action Montreal and as chairwoman of the Canadian Women’s Health Network.