October 12, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy
by Samantha King
Charities and corporations that fight breast cancer have been expanding greatly in recent years.
More than a million runners competed in the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation’s 2005 Race for the Cure, and Avon, Ford Motor Company, the National Football League, and many other corporations devote a significant amount of resources to combating the disease.
Samantha King, an associate professor of physical and health education and women’s studies at Queen’s University, in Canada, examines “the corporatization of breast-cancer activism” and why the disease has attracted more high-profile attention than other ailments.
She says that as charities have succeeded in raising money from companies to fight the cause, the businesses have influenced the priorities of breast-cancer activities.
With a businesslike focus on marketing an easy-to-remember message, companies have “a preoccupation with early detection to the virtual exclusion of other approaches to fighting the epidemic (e.g., prevention) and a failure to address the barriers, financial and otherwise, to treatment.”
Instead, she writes, “the disease has been constructed over the past two decades as a unifying issue that is somehow beyond the realm of politics, conflict, or power relations.”
As businesses have become more interested in using philanthropy to their benefit, Ms. King argues, their marketing strategies sell the unfortunate and narrow idea “of consumer-oriented solutions to social problems.”
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, Minn. 55401; (612) 627-1970; fax (612) 627-1980; http://www.upress.umn.edu; 208 pages; $24.95; ISBN 0-8166-4898-0.
