Bright Sided How Positive Thi Barbara Ehrenreich

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.” Something about the conjuncture of “breast,” signifying sexuality and nurturance, and that other word, suggesting the claws of a devouring crustacean, spooked almost everyone.Today, however, it’s the biggest disease on the cultural map, bigger than AIDS, cystic fibrosis, or spinal injury, bigger even than those more prolific killers of women—heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke.There are roughly hundreds of Web sites devoted to it, not to mention newsletters, support groups, a whole genre of first-person breast cancer books, even a glossy upper-middle-brow monthly magazine, Mamm.There are four major national breast cancer organizations, of which the mightiest, in financial terms, is the Susan G.Komen Foundation, headed by breast cancer survivor and Republican donor Nancy Brinker.Komen organizes the annual Race for the Cure®, which attracts about a million people—mostly survivors, friends, and family members.Its Web site provides a microcosm of the breast cancer culture, offering news of the races, message boards for accounts of individuals’ struggles with the disease, and uplifting inspirational messages.The first thing I discovered as I waded out into the relevant sites is that not everyone views the disease with horror and dread.Instead, the appropriate attitude is upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.There are between two and three million American women in various stages of breast cancer treatment, who, along with anxious relatives, make up a significant market for all things breast cancer related.Bears, for example: I identified four distinct lines, or species, of these creatures, including Carol, the Remembrance Bear; Hope, the Breast Cancer Research Bear, which wore a pink turban as if to conceal chemotherapy-induced baldness; the Susan Bear, named for Nancy Brinker’s deceased sister; and the Nick and Nora Wish Upon a Star Bear, which was available, along with the Susan Bear, at the Komen Foundation Web site’s “marketplace.”And bears are only the tip, so to speak, of the cornucopia of pink-ribbon-themed breast cancer products.You can dress in pink-beribboned sweatshirts, denim shirts, pajamas, lingerie, aprons, loungewear, shoelaces, and socks; accessorize with pink rhinestone brooches, angel pins, scarves, caps, earrings, and bracelets; brighten up your home with breast cancer candles, stained glass pink-ribbon candleholders, coffee mugs, pendants, wind chimes, and night-lights; and pay your bills with Checks for the Cure™.“Awareness” beats secrecy and stigma, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to “confront [my] mortality” bore a striking resemblance to the mall.This is not entirely, I should point out, a case of cynical merchants exploiting the sick.Some of the breast cancer tchotchkes and accessories are made by breast cancer survivors themselves, such as “Janice,” creator of the Daisy Awareness Necklace, among other things, and in most cases a portion of the sales goes to breast cancer research.Virginia Davis of Aurora, Colorado, was inspired to create the Remembrance Bear by a friend’s double mastectomy and told me she sees her work as more of a “crusade” than a business.When I interviewed her in 2001, she was expecting to ship ten thousand of these teddies, which are manufactured in China, and send part of the money to the Race for the Cure.If the bears are infantilizing—as I tried ever so tactfully to suggest was how they may, in rare cases, be perceived—so far no one had complained.“I just get love letters,” she told me, “from people who say, ‘God bless you for thinking of us.’ ”The ultrafeminine theme of the breast cancer marketplace—the prominence, for example, of cosmetics and jewelry—could be understood as a response to the treatments’ disastrous effects on one’s looks.No doubt, too, all the prettiness and pinkness is meant to inspire a positive outlook.But the infantilizing trope is a little harder to account for, and teddy bears are not its only manifestation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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