Risky Appeals: Recruiting to the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement in the Age of “Pink Fatigue”

Abstract

This essay analyzes and contrasts the rhetorical appeals of Breast Cancer Action and Breast Cancer Fund, the two national breast cancer organizations devoted to prevention and environmental activism. Following in the tradition of rhetoric scholars who understand rhetoric as constitutive of its audiences, I elucidate not only how these organizations recruit new audiences to their cause, but who they construct as recruitable. Ultimately, I demonstrate that one of these organizations' rhetorics is successful as constitutive rhetoric (the other's less so), but worry over the political and social actions potentially precluded by its successes. This organization's rhetoric, as I show, retains and thus recirculates many individualistic assumptions and regressive notions of femininity associated with the more mainstream breast cancer movement and, well beyond, with most hegemonic US discourses.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Brian Heckel for introducing her to BCA while she was still “thinking pink.” Special thanks also to Dawn Heinecken and Kelly Pender for particularly unsparing first reads of this essay's first draft and to the editor of RSQ and an anonymous reviewer for generous and generative feedback on later drafts. This article is dedicated to the memory of Marilyn B. Wagner.

Notes

¹Although Ehrenreich can be credited for particular prescience in bringing critiques of mainstream breast cancer culture's “tyranny of cheerfulness” (King 101) to a mass audience, such criticisms are by now pervasive and are offered by many authors I cite in this essay. See, especially, Samantha King; Gayle Sulik; Judy Segal.

²It is often assumed that the pink ribbon is Komen's symbol. However, the ribbon is a public domain symbol (which helps account for its ubiquity) and so can be appended to any product at any time. Komen trademarked its pink “running ribbon” symbol in the late 2000s to distinguish its ribbon from “generic pink ribbons” (see Sulik 147).

³BCF (founded in 1992) is the only national breast cancer organization devoted solely to prevention and environmental activism, a streamlined mission to which they shifted in 2000 after originally having a broader agenda (Klawiter 253). BCA (founded 1990) retains other commitments. In addition to environmental issues, they work on social justice issues that lead to disparities in breast cancer outcomes and for safer, more effective breast cancer treatments (“What”). In Klawiter's scheme they would thus be identified with both the culture of prevention/environmental activism and the culture of feminist treatment activism (see Ley, chapter 5, on the porousness of breast cancer activist cultures). The Avon Foundation for Women's Breast Cancer Crusade is the fourth national breast cancer organization. It is identified by both Klawiter and Samantha King as a part of pink ribbon culture.

⁴Although perhaps a common one, the general/particular distinction I make here is informed most overtly by Celeste Condit's work in Meanings of the Gene, and by the distinction she draws there between analyses of “discursive formations” versus “rhetorical formations.” See, especially, Appendix 1, pages 249–256.

⁵Phaedra Pezzullo's work may constitute an exception. Both her 2003 article, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month,‘” and the fourth chapter in 2007's Toxic Tourism (“Cancer and Cooptation”) provide rhetorical analyses of a particular aspect of the environmental breast cancer movement—the “Stop Cancer Where it Starts” “toxic tour” staged by the (now defunct) Toxic Links Coalition. (I draw from Toxic Tourism at length later in this essay.) However, Pezzullo's emphasis is fundamentally different from mine: while she certainly studies the tour's appeals (or lack thereof) to/with audiences, she engages in participatory analysis of the tour as public, embodied, rhetorical performance rather than in close textual-rhetorical analysis.

⁶I focus primarily on websites as representations of these two organizations' rhetorics because of the essential role websites play in “recruiting” to any cause in contemporary culture. Unless one lives in an urban area and/or attends progressive political functions, websites will likely be the only way audiences will encounter either of these groups.

⁷Importantly, this framing is not akin to the established “germ theory” of disease, which holds that disease occurs when outside “foreign organisms,” such as viruses or bacteria, “invade the body” (Condit, “Women's” 126). As Condit noted in 2000, cancer is “clearly inadequately accounted for by the germ theory” (129), and the germ theory inadequate to explain environmental (or social) factors in disease. Her concern at the time, however, was that the ascendant “gene theory” of disease moves us even further from attending to environmental factors as it “intensifies” and “essentializes” the internalizing focus on the individual body (140 n. 1).

⁸I borrow this phrase from Ulrich Beck's World at Risk.

⁹In 2009, the US Preventative Services Task Force released new mammographic screening recommendations that changed the recommended start-age for mammograms from 40 (back) to 50 and recommended biennial (instead of annual) screening after 50. The recommendations provoked much confusion among women aged 40–49 and were met with what has been widely described as “immediate and considerable controversy” (see “Most Recent”).

¹⁰BCA makes a virtually identical case for the omnipresence of lurking chemicals—“from preservatives in our lipstick to flame retardants in our sofas, from plasticizers in our water bottles to pesticides on our fruits and vegetables” (“Breast”). I concentrate on BCF in this section both because their website is more emotionally arresting with respect to these issues and in order to set up the contrast with BCA that follows. (BCA may make the same case for how many chemicals lurk in our everyday environments but demands a very different audience response.).

¹¹See my reference to Condit's concerns about the “gene theory” of disease in note 7.

¹²Potts views this as a goal of her own study: by having her two citizen groups (one a group of women with cancer; the other a group of women who were not ill) share narratives and make maps of hazards in their locales, they were able to reunderstand omnipresent risks as visible and calculable (whether they were currently ill or not) (118).

¹³“Toxic tours,” which are the focus of Pezzullo's study, “tour” citizens through areas that are polluted by toxic facilities or dumps. They are thus another means of concretizing risks too often conceived as inconceivable (176).

¹⁴“Pinkwashing” is a term coined by BCA in 2002 to refer to the corporate practice of marketing products with a pink ribbon that may actually be linked to the disease (BCA, Think 6).

¹⁵In the fall of 2012, BCA launched its new, election-year version of the “Think Before You Pink” campaign, pointedly titled, “It's An Epidemic Stupid.” This message greeted visitors to the website throughout the season.