The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism, and: DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women's Health Politics, and: The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America, and: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (review)

In 1970, a small group of women in Boston published a booklet titled Women and Their Bodies. In 1973, Simon & Schuster published an expanded edition of it called Our Bodies, Our Selves. For many, the story of the women's health movement in the United States begins in these moments. When we ask, "Has feminism changed medicine?" our measure of progress often starts here. The authors of the four books under review, however, are interested in a different though related project. Broadly, readers of these texts are asked to rethink how we remember, construct, and tell the story (or stories) of women's health politics and women's health movement(s) in the United States.

Maren Klawiter's The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism challenges dominant narratives in feminist analyses of medicine by rewriting the story of breast cancer activism in the United States. As Klawiter notes, histories of contemporary breast cancer activism often focus on the success and strategies of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC), a Washington, D.C.-based breast cancer advocacy organization founded in 1991, with the aims of "address[ing] the inadequacy of scientific research on breast cancer; the lack of medical progress in treating, diagnosing, and preventing it; and the absence of the voices of breast cancer survivors in breast cancer policy making" (xx-xxi). The story of the NBCC is, indeed, one of tremendous success through significant funding increases for breast cancer research, the activation of millions of women throughout the country as breast cancer activists, the development and adoption of a new "breast cancer survivor" identity, and inclusion of NBCC advocates on scientific advisory panels. Has feminism changed medicine? The answer here is "yes."

Klawiter complicates this standard account, however, in multiple ways. First, she suggests that the NBCC portrayal of breast cancer as a disease long-neglected by medical researchers is inaccurate, as "the federal government was [already] funding breast cancer research at a higher rate than for other cancers of equal or greater significance (measured by rates of incidence and mortality)" in the early 1980s, a decade prior to the founding of the NBCC (6). Second, she shifts the focus from the Beltway to the San Francisco Bay Area, which she identifies as an additional major hub of breast cancer activism in the United States. Third, her multi-sited ethnographic study of breast cancer activism in the Bay Area shows not only that the NBCC is remarkably absent as a player in this context, but also that there is no one, singular breast cancer movement even in this bounded geographic location. Instead, Klawiter finds three "cultures of action," each of which "foregrounded a different experience and understanding of breast/cancer" and "privileged different discourses of disease, different alliances, different identities, different body politics, different emotions, different priorities, and different agendas" (45).

The first culture of action (COA) focused on "the culture of early detection and screening activism" and "constructed 'breast cancer survivors' as the privileged identity, emphasized individual agency and responsibility, connected breast cancer survival to heteronormative femininities, created an emotion culture of caring gestures and uplifting feelings, and mobilized hope and faith in mainstream science, medicine, and the cancer establishment" (ibid.). The second COA...