- The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s Health by Tasha Dubriwny
Issues of women’s (failing) health have never been so visible or seemed so glamorous. Every October, America is awash in breast cancer awareness pink. Corporations trumpet their support for raising awareness and early detection by putting pink ribbons on everything from yogurt lids [End Page 771] to NFL football helmets. As Tasha Dubriwny points out in the introduction to her book, The Vulnerable Empowered Woman, the fight against heart disease has gone down a similar path. The American Heart Association’s “Go Red for Women” campaign has turned into a veritable red carpet event; beautiful celebrity advocates pose for photographs in red dresses that match the campaign’s feminine and trendy red dress logo.
However, the lived experience of illness often fails to align with these glamorous, hyperfeminized representations. The Vulnerable Empowered Woman joins a growing feminist discussion aimed at questioning the ever-increasing visibility of women’s health. Dubriwny argues that “contemporary representations of women’s health have been disarticulated from feminism and that this disarticulation has significant ramifications for women” (13). Although she acknowledges that some good has come from additional funding and heightened media attention, Dubriwny carefully examines the costs of greater visibility. Over the course of three case studies, she demonstrates that those paying the price are primarily poor women and women of color. She convincingly argues that feminist perspectives have increasingly been replaced by postfeminist logics of individualism and empowerment through consumer choice. These postfeminist narratives make individual women responsible for preventing, mitigating, and eliminating their own health risks by making the right medical choices.
Given the nearly infinite number of topics that could fall under the heading of “women’s health,” Dubriwny explains that she narrowed down her topics for analysis largely by selecting only “health topics that were the subject of substantial public discourse that was not limited to health campaigns sponsored by the government or by health organizations” (7). She provides little additional insight into the process by which she chose her case studies, which leaves the reader questioning just how broadly she intends for her conclusions to be applied. However, the three issues selected provide a relatively diverse view of women’s health, as the topics encompass physical, mental, and sexual health (without necessarily drawing firm lines between those categories). The middle portion of the book comprises chapters 2 through 4, which each examine a different case study: prophylactic mastectomies as a response to genetic risk of breast cancer, changing rhetorics of postpartum depression, and the public controversy over the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. [End Page 772]
The titular phrase “vulnerable empowered woman” refers to Dubriwny’s argument that women are constructed as at-risk/risky subjects in current popular narratives about women’s health. She explains that women are presumed to be “inherently (read: biologically) vulnerable to disease (that is, they are always high-risk subjects)” as well as “carriers of disease (thus women are also subjects that place others at risk)” (29). To theorize post-feminist narratives of risk, she draws from the slightly unusual combination of Walter Fisher and Michel Foucault. She approaches her archive, which ranges from celebrity memoirs and mommy blog posts to vaccine advertisements and statements made by Texas governor Rick Perry, “from within a narrative paradigm” (4). Her analysis of those narratives, however, is premised on a Foucauldian understanding of risk, “in which risk becomes a practice, technique, or rationality through which governing is accomplished and authority is exercised” (27).
Chapter 1 is devoted to theorizing the relationship between postfeminism and neoliberalism in the context of women’s health. Dubriwny argues that self-surveillance and self-discipline are transformed into modes of empowerment under the guise that such practices enable women to make risk-free/less risky choices. In chapter 2, Dubrwiny argues that narratives of genetics and breast cancer compel women to (literally) remove risk from their bodies through dramatic surgical intervention. Her analysis suggests that discourses...