Making Cancer Awareness “Hot”: An Iconographical Analysis of Anti-Breast Cancer Campaigns in Modern United States

An Iconographical Analysis of Anti-Breast Cancer Campaigns in Modern United States

Abstract

The article analyzes the visual rhetoric of early anti-cancer campaigns in the United States, revealing a gendered and racial-biased approach in the shaping of the public image of cancer. The author links the image of a healthy, young, thin, blemish-free, white woman alongside messages of cancer detection – still apparent in American media today – to the American medical field’s changing perspective towards cancer at the turn of the twentieth century. Targeting prevention over cure, physicians increasingly stressed that the ʻfight against cancerʼ began in the domestic sphere with the women of the household. The question became how to inform this matriarch of cancer symptoms and when to seek medical attention. Though much has been written on these campaigns, little attention has been brought to the decisions behind the exclusionary imagery that these advertisements employed to reach their target audience. Focusing on the efforts of the American Society for the Control of Cancer and its successor the American Cancer Society, the article argues that the early leaders of anti-cancer campaigns in the United States, predominantly white medical men, projected their narrow view of an ʻidealʼ woman onto the entire U.S. population, perpetuating a limited and exclusionary representation of health and womanhood.