Topic > Pink Ribbon Campaign Essay - 889

This is when institutions create cancer as the individual challenge to be overcome through various healthcare solutions, with the main goal of personal survival or being a survivor. However, this title of women becoming survivors leads to the idea that if a woman doesn't fight her fight, it is due to her individual inability to fight hard enough. Who doesn't become a survivor but rather someone who has failed. The blame is placed on individual women, rather than on the effect of the disease. The emphasis has been so much on the survivors' campaign and we don't realize that it's more than just the individual, that cancer is really a disease that affects women differently, but socially we're not exposed to that. We are under the “tyranny of joy” so if we donate money, buy products with the pink logo or even celebrate with those women who defeated it, we are someone who adds to the campaign to find a cure, but are we really? We simply find ourselves immersed in the joy of the pink ribbon campaign that hides the severity of cancer but claims to be trying to find a cure. Big companies, those working in the pink campaign, create marketing schemes that allow cancer to be a profit campaign to find the “cure”. Having slogans like “buy it, fight it” or “Blank for the cure” all project the cultural dichotomy of warrior and survivor into women with cancer. This tyranny of cheerfulness has become so normalized that we as a society have become so normalized to the “cheerful survivor.” We expect women to engage in walks, campaigns and purchase products to help in the fight against cancer, to engage in joy. We are expected to imagine Cancer as a cheerful woman, someone who is not suffering from an illness, a warrior, but what we are doing is simply masking Cancer socially as