ABSTRACT
BRCA discourses are necessarily gendered at a number of levels. Take, for instance, the words ‘breast cancer genes’. Reading this phrase conjures up a number of images and ideas: images of suffering in the word ‘cancer’, of familial potential in ‘genes’ and of women in ‘breasts’. Indeed, breasts are perhaps the iconic image of femininity, as is demonstrated by a simple image search on Google for ‘breast’, which generates countless images of women and their breasts, but virtually none of men. Arguably, breast cancer genetics has become directly, or indirectly, associated with femininity, thanks to the abundance of pink ribbon campaigns that construct ‘breast cancer’ as the archetypal women’s disease. Likewise, genetics and genes are associated with mothers and women as their reproductive centre and source (Steinberg 1996).
