From Pink to Green: Disease Prevention and the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement

Chapter 5: The Cultural Politics of Sisterhood

Chapter 5 106 In September 1999, the Breast Cancer Fund announced that it would be part of a new coalition, with Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the National Organization for Women (NOW), which would campaign for increased federal research on environmental causes of breast cancer. One of the coalition’s first efforts was a two-page letter to President Bill Clinton, copied to presidential candidates Governor George W. Bush of Texas; U.S. senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey; and Vice President Al Gore. Written on Breast Cancer Fund letterhead, the letter called on the president to remedy the nation’s failure to address possible environmental causes of the disease and, by extension, breast cancer prevention . The Breast Cancer Fund’s decision to send the letter to President Clinton in late October, in the final week of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, served to sharpen an already existing critique of the dominant breast cancer paradigm. Unlike other activist groups that criticized National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, however, the Breast Cancer Fund did not frame the letter’s environmental health demands in relation to critiques of the cancer industry. Instead, the organization conceptualized its environmental health demands and the coalition’s broader campaign goals through the lens of the population most affected by breast cancer and by the environmental factors linked the disease: women. In doing so, it took a feminist perspective, situating its demands for more environmental health research within the broader context of women’s health politics and activism. Women’s health is arguably one of the most common disease categories in which breast cancer activists situate the breast cancer problem. Thus, it is not surprising that the Breast Cancer Fund’s campaign and the environmental The Cultural Politics of Sisterhood The Cultural Politics of Sisterhood 107 breast cancer movement more generally often construct the environmental breast cancer problem through this particular lens. At the same time, the feminist perspective embraced by the campaign reflects only one of the ways in which activists, organizations, and others have constructed the environmental breast cancer problem as a women’s health issue. Not only do the gendered elements of environmental breast cancer activism sometimes take place outside a traditional feminist framework; the social, cultural, and political terrain of feminist breast cancer activism, like feminism in general, is also diverse in its own right. Consequently, the various ways in which activists construct the gendered dimensions of the environmental breast cancer issue lead to multiple approaches for addressing the problem. Such differences highlight the array of practices that activists use to inspire women and the broader public to partake in environmental breast cancer activism. Mapping the Feminist Politics of Environmental Health The Breast Cancer Fund’s 1999 letter to President Clinton outlined four research demands: increasing funding for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), establishing a national registry and inventory of the endocrinedisrupting and carcinogenic chemicals found in our bodies, fully funding the EPA’s Endocrine Disrupter Screening Program (EDSP), and establishing a crossagency committee to oversee government funding for environmental health research. The letter went on to explain how each of these research goals would lead to better understandings of the relationship between breast cancer and toxic exposures. The Breast Cancer Fund argued that increasing the overall NIEHS budget would make more financial and institutional resources available for the study of breast cancer, while increased “biomonitoring” would include a wider range of chemicals as well as the testing of breast milk, which “often contains high levels of carcinogenic and hormone-disrupting chemicals.” The letter justi- fies the EDSP budget by describing how hormone mimickers cause “the rapid growth of cancer cells.” Regarding the final demand, the Breast Cancer Fund observed that “recently, a $15 million appropriation earmarked for a study that would have explored environmental factors in regions with high breast cancer incidence was diverted to unrelated projects on genetics and air pollution. A cross-agency oversight committee that includes consumer participation would ensure the correct and wisest placement of new funding.”1 In making these demands, the coalition did not simply construct breast cancer as an environmental health issue. Rather, it framed the environmental breast cancer problem as a women’s health issue. After outlining the four actions that the Breast Cancer Fund wanted President Clinton to take, the letter stated, “We welcome the opportunity to discuss the above in greater detail with you and...