Dismantling the master's house: Cancer activists, discourses of prevention, and environmental justice

Cancer activists have increasingly turned to environmental factors in explanation of breast cancer “hot spots,” or places with precipitously high rates of incidence, and equally to explain what they have termed “an epidemic of breast cancer.” Prominent in the discursive strategies of cancer activists has been discussion of the failure of traditional “risk factors” for breast cancer to explain the recent increase in breast cancer incidence or their own diagnoses. Rather than locate the causes of breast cancer within the lifestyles and reproductive strategies of women living in industrial societies, as biomedical theories have for the most part argued, cancer activists have begun to look at the disruptions caused by industrial development, in particular, to the creation and unsafe containment of toxic substances. This essay examines the incipient collaboration between cancer activists and representatives of the environmental justice movement as one of the strategies used to challenge official discourse on the causes of breast cancer and develop an alternative method of prevention.