While several distinctions can be made between Susan G Komen’s Campaign website and the BCAction webpage, I considered the opposing perspectives of gender to be most notable. Like something out of a scrapbook, the Komen website features soft pastels and photographs of little girls in flouncy dresses to illustrate its overtly “feminine” stance on breast cancer. Not only do these representations portray the disease as a “women’s issue”, it adheres strictly to the constructions surrounding the binary gender model. To say this website is “pink-washed” would be an understatement.
The BCAction site, alternatively, was refreshing in its pursuit to “challenge the narrow definitions of femininity, womanhood, and sexuality that mainstream narratives about breast cancer impose on people at risk of and living with the disease” (BCAction). Not only did it confront crucial issues surrounding gender identity, it addressed those who self-identified outside the man/woman binary. For this reason, I considered the BCAction website’s approach to be far more in sync with the real social issues surrounding many individuals affected by the disease.