Manmade Breast Cancers - Softcover

Eisenstein, Zillah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801487072 ISBN 13: 9780801487071

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2001

Synopsis

A new understanding of humanity and feminism from the starting point of breast health is the ultimate goal of Zillah Eisenstein's political memoir of her family's experience with breast cancer. The well-known feminist author argues that politics always needs the personal, and that the personal is never enough on its own. Her return to the personal side of the political combines the two for a radicalized way of seeing, viewing, and knowing.

The author strives to bring together a critique of environmental damage and the health of women's bodies, gain perspective on the role race plays as a factor in breast cancers and in political agendas, link prevention and treatment, and connect individual support and political change.

Eisenstein was sixteen when her forty-five-year-old mother successfully battled breast cancer. Her two sisters, Sarah and Giah, were in their twenties when they were diagnosed, but neither of them survived. She received her own diagnosis when she was forty.

Despite her family history, however, Eisenstein rejects the simple argument that genes are simply determining, rather than liable to influence by external factors. She also questions the dominance of the theory that breast cancer is caused by high lifetime exposure to estrogen. Instead, she views breast cancer as an environmental disease, best understood in terms of ecological, racial, economic, and sexual influences on individual women. She uses the term "manmade" to indicate not only industrial carcinogens and other cultural causes, but also the male-dominated and -defined scientific practices of research and treatment.

In response, Manmade Breast Cancers offers a retelling of the meaning of breast cancer and a discussion of universal feminist issues about the body. The author says she writes "to discover a more just globe which will treasure the health of all of our bodies." The emotional depth and intellectual breadth of her argument adds new dimensions to how we understand breast cancer.

About this title

About the Author:

Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College. Among her other books are Global Obscenities; Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century; and The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy.

From Publishers Weekly:

A professor of politics at Ithaca College, Eisenstein (The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy) views breast cancer through a personal and a feminist political lens. Although she and her mother survived their breast cancers, two of her sisters died of the disease. These two terrible personal losses led Eisenstein to theorize about the impact of patriarchal societies on the prevalence and treatment of breast cancer. She believes that the current emphasis on the role of genes and estrogen in the high rates of breast cancer is simplistic and overstated a large percentage of breast cancers appear not to be estrogen-related, she notes, citing relevant studies. The more important factor of man-made environmental toxins and chemicals, she avers, is being ignored: "One is not born with breast cancer. One develops it. It grows over time. It has a history, inside, through, and outside our bodies." Eisenstein also makes the point, which has been argued elsewhere, that corporate profits interfere with a commitment to public health; even more, the same companies that produce carcinogenic toxins also sell supposed preventatives, like tamoxifen, an antiestrogen, which may, she says, actually be harmful to women. Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which is organized by the pharmaceutical company that produces tamoxifen, emphasizes early detection "but detection is not prevention," Eisenstein contends. Moreover, Eisenstein discusses evidence that minority women and women living in poor countries have less access to diagnostic tests and to treatment for breast cancer as a result of global capitalism and, therefore, of social injustice (she argues that global capitalism is antidemocratic). Eisenstein's argument will not appeal to the broad range of women readers many who don't share her leftist politics will reject her rhetoric, and her prose is sometimes mired in academese. But Eisenstein is passionate about her ideas and offers many provocative theories that will engage readers interested in the politics of illness.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0801487072
• ISBN 13: 9780801487071
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208