Portrait of Jo Spence. By Jo Spence & Rosy Martin. Photograph. Cirka 1984.

I’m part of a transdisciplinary research project looking into women’s experiences of breast loss and reconstruction. We are also testing out expressive writing as a therapeutic tool for breast cancer patients. Currently, we’re interviewing patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. In 2013, we will be including patients at Stavanger University Hospital for the Norwegian segment of the study.

Please visit our website for more information: http://notthesamebreast.org/

We are happy to receive comments and feedback from the public.

I do too. Spectacular Breasts have not perished - they’re just taking a well-deserved rest! I’ve been spending my freelance time writing research applications for the past weeks and haven’t had much time for the blog. More later!

Good news is, I’m currently guest blogging for Tou Camp 2012 - an eclectic multi-media, cross-cultural, intellectually hybrid festival based at Tou Scene, a culture factory in Stavanger, Norway. This year’s theme is identity. Most of my posts are in Norwegian, but I’m also catering for a wider audience from time to time.

You can check it out here: http://toucamp.posterous.com/

I am currently working with two other researchers to put together a project on women´s experiences of breast cancer and the function of writing in a difficult and/or traumatic life situation.

Being a relative newcomer to tumblr and the blogosphere in general, I am astonished to discover how many women turn to blogging as a means to express themselves through the breast cancer experience (or to express the trauma of breast cancer). I guess the social aspect is important too - that the Internet offers a vast digital network of other breast cancer patients across the globe, supportive readers and so on.

Anyway: just wanted to say that I am following you with great interest and really appreciate your engagement with this blog. I would also be very grateful if you can send me a few lines/comments explaining what writing/blogging means to you as a woman, as a breast cancer patient, as a survivor. The following are questions that I am curious to know more about:

What does writing do for you, that talking cannot?

What does blogging mean to you, compared to other social interactions?

Has breast cancer changed your relationship with writing?

Did you blog before breast cancer?

Has blogging/writing had affected on your relationships with others in any way?

Female writing sculpture (photo): Flickr.com/takomabibelot

I am sad to read the news, that Adrienne Rich is dead at 82.

What a remarkable voice! As a woman, mother, poet, thinker: what intense wisdom, critical ability and imagination reside in her corpus and aura. See the image of this beautiful woman above, and read her work to feel her breath alive again.

To me, her work on articulating the institution and experience of mothering, although published in 1976 (the year before I was born), retains its force and urgency (1):

Many women see any appeal to the physical as a denial of mind. We have been perceived for too many centuries as pure Nature, exploited and raped like the earth and the solar system; small wonder if we now ling to become Culture: pure spirit, mind. Yet it is precisely this culture and its political institutions which have split us off from itself. In so doing it has also split itself off from life, becoming the death-culture of quantification, abstraction, and the will to power. which has reached its most refined destructiveness in this century. It is this culture and politics of abstraction which women are talking of changing, of bringing accountability in human terms.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers. The female body has been both territory and machine, virgin wilderness to be exploited and assembly-line turning out life. We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence - a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed.

This is where we have to begin.

Rich was married to a man for 17 years. They had three children together. Some time after her husband´s death in 1970, she fell in love with another woman. These experiences make for an interesting autobiography, and form the foundation for Rich´s critical feminist discourse, a red thread that runs through all her work.

I have a special relationship with one of her texts, which formed an integral part of my thesis, in a chapter where I tried to generate an alternative poetic of/for breast loss. The poem, ‘A Woman Dead in her Forties’, was written between 1974-1977. Rich’s text, three years in the making, maps a life cycle: the becoming of breasts; of two women as they grow up together; of the other’s early death and the one who is left with the memories. It is a celebration of, and a memorial to, female friendship from girlhood to middle age and beyond. The breast cancer of a childhood-friend provokes a looking back for the poet-friend, a retrospective of both women´s lives. Rich’s writing in itself constitutes an act of solidarity – and it is true, that as a woman, it is hard not to identify with, not to feel the pain of the friend, sister, mother, or daughter with breast cancer. It is hard not to think: what if it were me instead of you? The poet is haunted by the silent inheritance left by the other woman (2):

Your breasts/            sliced off            The scars

dimmed     as they would have to be

years later

                     […]

You are every woman I ever loved

and disavowed

            ●

a bloody incandescent chord strung out

across years, tracts of space

                     […]

Of all my dead it’s you

who come to me unfinished

You left me amber beads

strung with turquoise from an Egyptian grave

I wear them wondering

How am I true to you?

In Rich’s text there are no periods – there can be no full stops (stopping is dying). The wide spaces between certain words seem to express distance and rupture (the space between the two). And the slash is cutting the fabric of the poem, whereas / the black dots    ●    these rounded pausing figures of sadness and mourning - these rounded black breasts, divide the verses, mark the empty white paper spaces.

Women are not born with breasts, they grow and evolve and change throughout life. Why then, is it so hard to come to terms with breast loss, another change in the spectrum of breast experience? The thoughts of lesbian feminist writers like Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), and (the “straight”) queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) prove almost liberating in the context of figuring breast loss. They are women who, having been marked by the disease personally or relationally, argue (in their own different ways) explicitly against the hetero-normative grains in breast cancer discourse, discourses on recovery and sexuality. Their thoughts have implications, especially for the contestable notion that one can re-normalize the cancerous woman by reconstructing the lost breast(s): to re-make her femininity and stabilise her desirability as heterosexual object, by reconstituting the form of the breast, when the organ, with all its history, complexities and sensations is gone.

I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things

The breasts remain in memoriam.

Adrienne Rich - R.I.P.

Pink Ribbon star doll - a figure designed to encourage girls to support the fight against breast cancer.

October 6th, 1997 American citizen Paul Davidson registered pinkribbon.com and launched a website directed to and available for all people in the world engaged with breast cancer, The website was dedicated to raising awareness and funding for breast cancer.

In 2008, the initiative was extended and expanded creating the non profit network Pink Ribbon Inc. in New York. The objectives were defined and the idea launched of an international charity platform for breast cancer awareness and funding (awareness, advocacy, alliances, alignment and accreditation).

Throughout the years this initiative has grown into the international platform as we know it today, covering more than 30 countries over 5 continents.

I have been preparing for a post about the politics of the Pink Ribbon breast awareness campaigns, including the Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October). Then I came across this link to a film review in The Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960417-6/fulltext

I am really looking forward to this documentary, which critically examines the forces and motives behind the commercialisation and pinkyfication of breast cancer activism.

I recently did a presentation on breasts, and wanted to encourage my audience to donate money to breast cancer research. Because of my increased scepticism of Pink Ribbon, I searched for a non-pink breast cancer charity, only to discover that if you want to donate money to the breast cancer cause in Norway - you have to go through Pink Ribbon (Rosa Sløyfe). Is it just me who is paranoid, or has Pink Ribbon become the imperialist master of breast cancer campaigning?

Pinkyfication is in itself an interesting issue - for what do people tend to associate with pink? Girls, sillyness, princesses - in short: extreme femininity. Pink is a child´s version of the feminine (see illustration above). I don´t find pink a very powerful symbol at all - it is sweet and feminine, but it does not get me feeling angry or defiant. I wonder what is going on behind the intense colour-washing of breast cancer.

October is the official Breast Cancer Awareness Month, with each year being pinker than the last. Breast Cancer Awareness Month is all about increasing the awareness of the importance of early breast cancer detection.

Historically, the ribbon tradition is tied to the yellow ribbons that symbolised a family´s longing for their soldier-sons to come home from war. Then AIDS arrived, and the need for a symbol of solidarity and de-stigmatisation was needed - hence the Red Ribbon was born. The Red Ribbon of AIDS with its connotations of gay activism, has now been practically pushed out of the collective consciousness by the heteronormative Pink Ribbon, adding further evidence to the colonizing powers of the pink wave.

According to the pink.org website, the Pink Ribbon didn’t start out pink at all. It started out as a homemade peach ribbon, the creation of Charlotte Hayley, who had herself been diagnosed with breast cancer and campaigned for more research funding: ” She attached them to cards saying, “The National Cancer Institute’s annual budget is 1.8 billion US dollars, and only 5 percent goes to cancer prevention. Help us wake up our legislators and America by wearing this ribbon.” Strikingly, Hayley resisted attempts to commercialise her ribbon but eventually joined efforts to raise awareness about the disease:

The cosmetics industry got on board in 1991 to promote breast cancer awareness with the help of Evelyn Lauder of Estée Lauder Cosmetics and Alexander Penney, the editor-in-chief of SELF magazine. When Evelyn Lauder and Alexander Penney were working on their breast cancer awareness promotion, they liked Charlotte Hayley’s concept of giving ribbons to promote the support of breast cancer awareness.

It seems to me a fair claim to state that capitalism has begun a process of hijacking breast cancer. Why? Because cancer mamma is seen as a kind of grotesquely “glamorous” female disease. It is a far more alluring cancer than cancer of the ovaries or uterus, or even prostate cancer, for that matter. The market segment is potentially vast, as breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women - and many women fear the disease.

The sexual and symbolic allure of breasts in western culture acts as an aggressive contagion, even in the complicated field where these organs become a severe threat to a woman´s health. Culturally, the glamour persists, even where breasts radically change their symbolic character and begin to embody the tension between life and death, the cure for which can only be shiny Swarovski-bejewelled Pink Ribbon products. The entire “business” of this exchange is gendered - the colour of the logo is just the start. The Pink Ribbon products that are supposed to fight breast cancer are mainly clothing, cosmetics and jewellery - deliberately targeted at female consumers, superbly feminine in their branding and packaging - typically toxic for the environment and our bodies, possibly even carcinogenic. 

Because many women dread breast cancer and most of us know someone whose life has been affected by the disease, we are emotionally coerced into embracing the Power of the Pink Ribbon as the only means to show solidarity with other women. Instead of donating money directly to cancer charities or research organizations, instead of showing more love for women with breast cancer, we are channeling money to major corporate brands, who then, charitably, give a share of their profits to the Pink Ribbon campaigns. It is a win-win situation, for the Pink Power Brand - a fertile allegiance between cancer research/awareness organizations and the many corporations who want a piece of the action (and come across as “nice” by doing so).

The Pink Ribbon is a brand of global stature. It now stands as a massive conglomerate of commercial and idealistic agents - a vast breast cancer empire.

The questions is: who profits most in the long run?

Sources:

http://www.pinkribbon.org/