An All-Consuming Cause

Abstract

In an oft-recited story, Nancy Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, tells how she approached an executive of a lingerie manufacturer to suggest that they include a tag in their bras reminding customers to get regular mammograms. In response, the executive told Brinker, “We sell glamour. We don’t sell fear. Breast cancer has nothing to do with our customers” (Davidson 1997, 36). The fortunes of Brinker and the Komen Foundation have clearly changed since 1984, when this event is said to have taken place. Nancy Brinker is now recognized as a pioneer of cause-related marketing, and the Komen Foundation has over a dozen national sponsors, a “million dollar council” comprising businesses that donate at least $1 million per year, and a slew of other corporate partnerships at both the local and national levels (Davidson 1997). The foundation even has a contract with a lingerie company —Wacoal — to manufacture an “awareness bra” (Frontline 1999, 10).1 The transformation of the American public’s attitude to breast cancer is a central theme in the contemporary proliferation of academic and popular discourse on the disease. Maren Klawiter (2000), for instance, argues that a destigmatization of breast cancer in U.S. culture has occurred as new social spaces, solidarities, and sensibilities among breast cancer survivors and activists have emerged from the multiplication of treatment regimens, the proliferation of support groups, and the expansion of screening into asymptomatic populations in the past twenty years. Breast cancer scholars, however, understandably committed to focusing on the resistive strategies of grassroots activism and to charting substantive changes in the funding and regulation of breast cancer research, screening, and treatment, have tended to avoid the role played by breast can