(sends its love.)

Feb. 3, 2012 at 11:37pm with 33 notes

Reblogged from amyrebeccaklein

"The Komen controversy...has ramifications beyond the budgets of the two organizations: it provided a long-overdue spotlight on the difference between feminism as a brand and feminism as a political movement."

amyrebeccaklein:

A good argument for why we need radical feminism in 2012:

“The past decades have seen the rise of a nominally apolitical marketing campaign masquerading as feminism, with Komen merely the most visible symbol. Komen aligns perfectly with what Linda Hirshman labeled ‘choice feminism’—a moral-relativist approach to feminism that tries to scrub the movement of politics and value judgments in favor of uncritical affirmation of all women’s choices.

In her statement of apology, Komen CEO Nancy Brinker said, ‘We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics—anyone’s politics.’ That’s exactly the fallacy—that somehow women’s health can be narrowed to an apolitical and innocuous agenda. Women’s bodies are the most politicized sites on earth. When women focus on a hyperfeminine aesthetic at the expense of issues of substance, we end up with a hot pink ghetto of goodwill that forfeits the conversation about rights, access and money to the menfolk.

For the past decade, this has been the feminist’s lament: How do we identify the line where feminism becomes a marketing strategy for the very patriarchy it nominally opposes—selling a non-threatening agenda that doesn’t buck the status quo? It’s often hard to tell reclamation from capitulation, and easier to rely on shorthand symbols like, say, the color pink and ‘you go girl’ sloganeering; it’s tempting to assume that everyone’s on the same ideological page. By the time you realize that’s not the case, you’ve already purchased hundreds of dollars of carcinogenic cosmetics and applauded NFL players accused of sexual assault for courageously donning pink shoes.

As the infantilizing blush-hued gear has proliferated, the pink saturation has merged the medical industrial complex with the Disney princess-industrial complex, making women’s health policy some sort of adult dress-up game. In her landmark 2009 essay ‘Cancerland,’ Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, ‘To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity…. In the post-feminist United States, issues like rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy seem to be too edgy for much public discussion, but breast cancer is all apple pie.’ Breast cancer has become a safe cause because no one can blame a woman for her cancer but reproductive health—you know, the kind that deals with the fact that women have sex—is where the rubbers hit the road…”