gender

Supplemental composed by Alison Marie Kenner, RPI, October 2007

Cancer Butch
S. Lochlann Jain

This essay is part of the curated collection on Literature, Writing & Anthropology

ABSTRACT
The academic literature still tends to take Audre Lorde as the primary feminist theorist of breast cancer, and her The Cancer Journals (1997) remains, nearly three decades out, the definitive word on breast cancer and gender theory. In this article, Jain revisits the cultures and politics of cancer, offering a queer analysis of breast cancer in the U.S.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
S. Lochlann Jain is an assistant professor of cultural and social anthropology at Stanford University. Professor Jain's research is primarily concerned with the ways in which stories get told about injuries, how they are thought to be caused, and how that matters. Figuring out the political and social significance of these stories has led to the study of law, product design, medical error, and histories of engineering, regulation, corporations, and advertising.

Her widely reviewed book, Injury, (Princeton University Press, 2006) aims to better understand how certain products come to be understood as dangerous, while others do not -- and what these differences can illustrate about differences such as race and gender and historically contingent notions such as responsibility and negligence.

Jain’s current work offers an analysis of the cause and treatment of cancer as a key modality through which American high-tech is experienced and explained.

Her other research interests include extra-legal forms of communications, such as warning signs and medical apologies; queer studies; art and design.

Jain was awarded the Cultural Horizons Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology for best article published in the journal Cultural Anthropology in 2004. She was a National Humanities Center Fellow in 2006, and is currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

For more information, please see Lochlann Jain's website.

EDITORIAL OVERVIEW

In the November 2007 issue of Cultural Anthropology, S. Lochlann Jain challenges apparently well-intentioned pink ribbon campaigns promoting breast cancer awareness, arguing that the campaigns deflect attention from the causes of breast cancer and fail to support diverse “illness identities.” Jain’s essay, “Cancer Butch,” examines how U.S. breast cancer culture is shaped by “pink marketing” and “corporate care,” in ways that deny suffering, deny differences among women with breast cancer, and obfuscate corporate interests. The essay begins at an elaborate breast cancer awareness event at a BMW dealership, where attendees could drive a sports car with a pink-ribbon paint job.

Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua
Cymene Howe
Cultural Anthropology Feb 2008, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 48-84.
Supplemental material

Fashions and Fundamentalisms in Fin-De-Siecle Yemen: Chador Barbie and Islamic Socks
Anne Meneley

EDITORS' OVERVIEW
How have styles of religiosity among Islamic women shifted in recent years, and how are shifts in styles of religiosity connected to changing forms of commodity production and consumption? Anne Meneley takes up these questions in "Fashions and Fundamentalisms in Fin-de-Siecle Yemen: Chador Barbie and Islamic Socks," in the May 2007 issue of Cultural Anthropology. Meneley, an associate professor at Trent University in Ontario, conducted research for the essay during a return trip to Yemen in 1999. Meneley's earlier research, based in the Yemeni town of Zabid, examined how women's visiting patterns, hospitality and dress were means of securing status and honor. Her book, Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni Town, is widely regarded as a superb teaching text.