In a time where cancer is quite common it is no wonder that there has become a normalization towards female cancer patients. The normalization of cancer in females can be broken down by what we call the pink ribbon campaign complex. It is how cancer has become a cultural and social norm that once a woman is diagnosed with cancer, she becomes a warrior against her body in the fight to become a survivor and cancer free. This normalization has reached to a point where it can be seen in marketing products. We all have seen either in a store or in a form of media the types of commercialization and marketization that cancer has become, especially in women. Companies have joined the production of the pink ribbon campaign by plastering pink colours …show more content…
This is when institutions create cancer as the individual challenge to overcome through various health solutions, with the main focus on personal survival or being a survivor. However this titling of women becoming survivors leads to the idea that if a women does not beat her fight that it was individually her inability to fight hard enough. That she becomes not a survivor but rather someone who failed. The blame becomes placed upon the individual women, rather than the effect of the disease. The emphasis has been placed so highly on the campaigning of survivors and that we don’t realize that it’s more than just the individual, that cancer is indeed a disease that effects women differently but socially we aren’t exposed to that. We are under the “tyranny of cheerfulness” that if we donate the money, we buy the products with the pink logo or even celebrate with those women who have beat it we are someone adding to the campaign to find a cure, but are we really? We find ourselves simply engaging within the cheerfulness of the pink ribbon campaign that hides the severity of cancer but claims to be trying to find a cure for it. Large companies, those that work into the pink campaign, create marketing schemes that allow for cancer to be a profit campaign to find the “cure”. Having slogans of “buy it, fight it” or “Blank for the cure” all project the cultural dichotomy of warrior to survivor in women with cancer. This tyranny of cheerfulness has become so normalized that we as a society have become so normalized to the “cheerful survivor”. We expect women to engage in walks, campaigns and product purchasing to help the fight with cancer, to engage in the cheerfulness. We are expected to envision cancer as a cheerful woman, someone unaffected by a disease, a warrior, but what we are doing is simply masking cancer socially as
A certain value is put on commodities and services that in turn promote “consumption of products that encourages conformity to feminine beauty ideology”. (Johnston & Taylor, 2008) Media and advertising also immensely influences the way one looks at themselves and how much they compare their own beauty to the models on TV screens and in magazines. Through advertising, Dove promotes a movement to minimize institutionalized and structural gender inequality, and encourages the practise of self-care. Although its is makes great business sense, it is clear that their is a prioritization of commodity purchases above the overall message which creates brand loyalty. Dove shows mixed messages early on in their campaign as they are “telling women to buy creams, "slim" down, put on a bra and generally engage in… the "body project" (Essig, April 22, 2013) and “young girls started to worry far more about cellulite on their thighs than goodness in their hearts”.
Although illness narratives are not novel or new, their prevalence in modern popular literature could be attributed to how these stories can be relatable, empowering, and thought-provoking. Susan Grubar is the writer for the blog “Living with Cancer”, in The New York Times, that communicates her experience with ovarian cancer (2012). In our LIBS 7001 class, Shirley Chuck, Navdeep Dha, Brynn Tomie, and I (2016) discussed various narrative elements of her more recent blog post, “Living with Cancer: A Farewell to Legs” (2016). Although the elements of narration and description (Gracias, 2016) were easily identified by all group members, the most interesting topics revolved around symbolism as well as the overall impression or mood of the post.
Lerner, Barron H. The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-century America. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
She argues that a positive outlook will not make one cancer free, give one a job, make one wealthy or do you constantly happy. The beginning of the book made me realize that the balance of positive and negative thinking is the most important life lesson. She shows the readers how staying positive through her battles of cancers is going to make it easier, but Ehrenreich is trying to explain to the readers that it is okay to be negative. Ehrenreich gives the readers more of a negative side and thinks being positive is beginning to harm us. I can understand why she was thinking so negative while she was battling cancer, she was told by a cancer patient, “I know that if I get sad, or scared or upset, I am making my tumor grow faster and it will have shortened my life” (Ehrenreich 43). Ehrenreich sure did give the audience a way of understanding as to how people rely too much on positivity. She tells us that one will need to
Cancer is a deadly disease that millions of people die from a year. Many loved ones are killed with little to no warning affecting families across our world. My family happened to be one that was affected by this atrocious disease. This event changed the way my family members and I viewed cancer.
In modern society, people often look at cancer as an incurable disease, a sign of death approaching closer towards your entity, but one man stood up and tried to nullify these assumptions. In the quest of curing cancer, a humanitarian, cancer research activist, Terrance Stanley Fox, dedicated his life into granting fundraising all around Canada, running a full-length marathon (forty two kilometers) every single day for till his parting death, while enduring his Amputated leg and rising awareness of the illness at the same time. He successfully raised a total of twenty four million dollars by the first of February 1981, plunging a significant influence in people’s heart till this day. Terry Fox is the greatest Canadian in history, because he
...in to treat African American women as a whole instead of patient X, then there will be a change in the rate of deaths among African American women with breast cancer. However, these women must also decide to trust those providers and receive pre-screenings in order to be proactive about their own health, and the government needs to actively provide affordable ways for women to receive these screenings. There is plenty of evidence available that shows the problems with African American women dying from breast cancer, so people must be educated and aware of the problem in order to bring about a change in society. As Louis Giglio once said, “awareness brings about action, and action brings about change,” and hopefully, people will use this information to bring about awareness to ripple into change for African American women aged 40-80 especially regarding breast cancer.
Later on in the century, Second Wave Feminism in the 1950s and 1980s, combatted against the strictly women’s duty of having to perform the “housekeeping, cooking, sex and fulltime care for [the couples] children” (Hamilton pg. 41) in exchange for their husbands to share their salaries with them. Although, Second Wave Feminism is still ongoing today, Third Wave feminism emerged during the 1990s and dealt with the empowerment which “is not simply conferred on an individuals but something that can be shared with everyone” (Bromley pg. 49). This is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the fact or action of acquiring more control over one 's life or circumstances through increased civil rights, independence, self-esteem, etc” (Oxford English Dictionary) of women. The program speaks to the belief that women deserve to feel good about their appearance as they go through something as challenging as cancer. As a result, the program of ‘Look Good Feel Better’ is a practice of empowerment because the goal of the program is created due to the idea that “if a woman with cancer can be helped to look good, [the] chances are she’ll feel better, her spirits will be lifted and [she will] be [able] to face her illness with greater confidence” (Look Good Feel Better p.1). The idea of empowerment that Third Wave Feminism addresses is perpetuated through the ‘Look Good Feel Better’
People with cancer often begin to define themselves based on their experience with their illness, this self-definition through one’s cancer is one that the characters fear in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The novel shows how the characters strive to discover their identities, but despite that are still identified by their illness. The novel also makes the argument that young people with cancer are not any more virtuous or different than other kids rather, they are just normal kids living with an illness. Augustus wants to be remembered and also be more than just a boy who battled cancer, but despite his efforts is still identified by his illness.
With the ongoing expansion of technology, being “at risk” has become a common diagnosis that requires its own cycle of prescriptions and treatments. It’s almost like biomedicalization has become a disease like state in itself. Fosket uses this perspective to analyze the emergence of pharmaceuticals as credible strategies for breast cancer prevention and the analogous emergence of a group of women designated “high risk” for breast cancer and targeted for pharmaceutical interventions. These interventions include Chemoprevention, which is “the practice of ingesting pharmaceuticals or nutraceuticals to prevent disease” (Fosket 331). This practice of Chemoprevention was also seen in many articles we read this semester, some of which is Dumit’s “Pharmaceutical Witnessing and Direct-to-Consumer Advertising”, where he mentions how people may experience things that may not be pathological, like heart burn, b...
The book begins with a narrative of cancer relating back to its history. Cancer in the book is discussed as a confusing, complex disease that was hard to decode by doctors for over a century. Mukherjee gives rich details about the way people assessed breast cancer in the nineteenth century discussing how radiation and chemotherapy were once used before modern times. Further, into the book, Mukherjee shares with personal experience working in the field of
When I was 15 years old I joined my high school’s first committee to hold an American Cancer Society Relay for Life. All school year long I had pranced around the cafeteria handing out flyers with a picture of a little kid with cancer and advertised for our event. These poor kids are so sick and need to have money raised for them to find a cure so that no one would have to suffer like that. No one really needed to be shone the pictures or told the story, they had all seen it before on television in commercials, but we reiterated it once again, we hammered in the idea that these images were the literal definition of sick.
The author structures the short story according to several shifts to portray the uncertainty we inevitably experience daily. Jinny, the main character, suffers from cancer. She manages to come to terms with this news, but now she has to experience another shift. Through a three-part flashback narrative technique, the author introduces to readers late in the story what the latest news is regarding her health. Jinny remembers that the doctor said, “I do not mean the battle is over, just that this is a favorable sign…we do not know that there may not be more trouble in the future but we can say we are cautiously optimistic” (76). Jinny remembers this crucial shift during a casual conversation. While the readers would expect this shift towards a positive side to bring her joy, Jinny in fact reacts negatively, fact shown by her inner reflection: “It was too much. What he had said made everything harder. It made her have to go back and start this year all over again” (77). Jinny had finally grown used to knowing that she could die soon due to cancer, and now she had to deal with the probability that she would survive.
Susan G. Komen is a breast cancer awareness and research center looking to end breast cancer forever. Breast cancer is one of the most common type of cancers found in women. The research center holds a “Race for a Cure” run yearly to raise money for breast cancer patients. They not only fund research in the United States, but 17 other countries as well. The Komen research program has made a significant progress that has contributed too many import...
...n tell us that we can support one another for cancers. There are numerous good things that can come out of media, but we must know the difference between what is good and what is not.