Samantha King

In 2005, more than one million people participated in the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Race for the Cure, the largest network of 5K runs in the world. Consumers thoughtfully choose products ranging from yogurt to cars, responding to the promise that these purchases will contribute to a cure for the disease. And hundreds of companies and organizations support Breast Cancer Awareness Month, founded by a pharmaceutical company in 1985 and now recognized annually by the president of the United States. What could be wrong with that? In Pink Ribbons, Inc., Samantha King traces how breast cancer has been transformed from a stigmatized disease and individual tragedy to a market-driven industry of survivorship. In an unprecedented outpouring of philanthropy, corporations turn their formidable promotion machines on the curing of the disease while dwarfing public health prevention efforts and stifling the calls for investigation into why and how breast cancer affects such a vast number of people. Here, for the first time, King questions the effectiveness and legitimacy of privately funded efforts to stop the epidemic among American women. Pink Ribbons, Inc. grapples with issues of gender and race in breast cancer campaigns of businesses such as the National Football League; recounts the legislative history behind the breast cancer awareness postage stamp—the first stamp in American history to raise funds for use outside the U.S. Postal Service; and reveals the cultural impact of activity-based fund-raising, such as the Race for the Cure. Throughout, King probes the profound implications of consumer-oriented philanthropy on how patients experience breast cancer, the research of the biomedical community, and the political and medical institutions that the breast cancer movement seeks to change. Highly revelatory—at times shocking—Pink Ribbons, Inc. challenges the commercialization of the breast cancer movement, its place in U.S. culture, and its influence on ideas of good citizenship, responsible consumption, and generosity. Samantha King is associate professor of physical and health education and women’s studies at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario.

This article explores the metabolic lives of whey powder, the most popular form of protein supplement in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry during the past two decades. Faced with the slippery and elusive properties latent to this multiplicitous substance, our approach is to follow whey powder from its mid-20th century emergence as a noxious byproduct of industrial dairy production, through the human and animal bodies unevenly tasked with its processing, and out into waterways, where its nitrogen density rematerializes as a pollutant. We show how whey powder emerged as a solution to the environmental damage posed by whey pollution, how such damage is an effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries and how whey’s toxicity persists through processes of metabolism and consumption, despite attempts to process and profit from its vital capacities. Throughout, we argue that whey exemplifies ecological embodiment, understood as the co-constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification.

This chapter locates and explores the development of the author’s own scholarly practice within a larger history of feminist cultural studies associated with the University of Birmingham, UK. The chapter begins with a discussion of the history of the Birmingham School and the particular place of feminism within that history. It then moves to a review of three defining features of a feminist cultural studies approach—intersectionality, contextualization and politicization—illustrated with examples from past and present work in sport, leisure and physical education. The chapter concludes with some tentative observations about the place of cultural studies in these fields today.