Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 37

Breast Cancer Discourse in Cyberspace

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“Lacey Brazeer” song, here its power to inform women’s body projects, including
ones related to negotiating their traditional, heteronormative femininity, is but
tressed. Cosmetic surgeons are presented as the final experts not only on the over
all safety of cosmetic surgery for women but even on the psychological appropri
ateness of cosmetic surgery for individual women. What is astonishing about un
veiled endorsements like these is not so much that they are wholly uncritical of
cosmetic surgery discourse and of the heteronormative assumptions about women’s
femininity, beauty, and self-esteem that underwrite it — after all, popular culture
is full o f such messages. Rather, what is significant is that navigators of “Breast
Fest” who arrive at such messages have done so through the route o f breast cancer
awareness. This route has been facilitated by both the “breast” focus and the con
vergence of biomedical, consumerist, and liberal feminist languages.
This leveling of cosmetic surgery, breast cancer, consumerism and liberal
feminist discourses is highly effective because it obscures the distinctiveness of
each, which on their own, even if they are problematic, might be seen as offering
distinct priorities for women’s embodiment and body projects. For instance,
biomedicine’s overall focus on women’s health might be seen as distinct from and
even in conflict with cosmetic surgery’s focus on women’s beauty. Feminist criti
cism has already made this obvious for healthy women, and even in breast cancer
circles the debates over reconstructive surgery now address the distinctiveness of
health and cosmetic priorities.
In addition, liberal feminism’s interest in combating sex discrimination
and negative body images might be seen in stark contrast to Victoria’s Secret’s
representations of women’s bodies. Competitions between discourses can foster
their denaturalization by highlighting the gaps and inconsistencies in their ideolo
gies. As they are appropriated by popular culture in this instance, however, they
normalize an individualistic, heterodominant version of femininity — and femi
nism — and locate both in health- promoting, beautifying, self-caring body projects
that depend upon corporate and biomedical consumption.

The Visible Body, Invisible Illness
The emphasis on self-care projects, as Laura Potts (2000) points out, also
affirms and normalizes the visibility of the female body. However, this visibility
applies only to healthy female bodies. Given that these bodies are encouraged not
only to be healthy and assertive in the workplace, but also to be sculpted (literally),
adorned and generally prepared as objects of the male gaze, it is not too much to
say that these bodies are ultimately positioned according to a masculinist-penetrative logic, albeit in postmodern, (post) feminist fashion. In contrast, women who
actually have breast cancer are marginalized or made invisible. Their concerns,
which are often less about beauty than about long-term survival (Saywell 2000),