Queer Scholar Luncheon: "Men have breasts too! cripping and queering the pinkification of breast cancer"
Center for Women, Gender & Sexuality
cwgs@umassd.edu
Dr. Kristin Abatsis McHenry presents" Men have breasts too! cripping and queering the pinkification of breast cancer". Lunch provided.
While men with breast cancer make up a relatively small percentage of breast cancer cases, their experiences of diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship are rarely discussed in part because the breast cancer movement in its pink ribbon discourse perpetuates narrow binary gender constructions which position femininity as central to breast cancer. In feminist scholarship, much has been said about women’s breasts as sexualized, objectified, fetishized, and regulated within structures of heteropatriarchy. Just as women’s breast cancer narratives reveal much about women’s relationships to breasts and structures of gender, heteronormativity, race, and normate bodies, likewise men’s breast cancer narratives and illness experiences do as well. Using queer feminist analysis and disability frameworks I analyze men’s survivor stories and representation posted on six advocacy organization’s websites conducting analysis of heteromasculinity found men’s breast cancer experiences, by focusing on the queer contexts of disability found in male breast cancer discourse. This presentation seeks to disrupt the feminization of breast cancer, and to argue that male breast cancer warrants attention not because it is a common experience but rather because it gives insight into understandings of gender, the body, and disability.
Kristen Abatsis McHenry’s research interests include: genealogies and politics of cancer, and environmental health advocacy, and the gendered health dimensions of fracking using feminist technoscience theoretical frameworks. Kristen Abatsis McHenry holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She completed her M.A. at Georgia State University in Women's studies, and her B.A. is from Ithaca College in Women’s Studies and Politics. Kristen Abatsis McHenry published her first book The Green Solution to Breast Cancer: the Promise of Prevention (2015 Praeger) and is currently working on her next book manuscript Don't Frack Your Mother under contract with University of Washington Press' Feminist Technoscience Series. She has also published articles in Signs, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and Energy Research and Social Science. She currently is the Director of Health and Society and Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.