EDUCATIONAL RESPONSES TO THE CANCER INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX PINK WAR MACHINE: THEORIZING GENDER INSUBORDINATION FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF BREAST AND GYNECOLOGICAL CANCERS
Premised upon John Dewey’s contention that dualist notions of minds isolated and elevated from bodies are an “evil” perpetuated in education (1916), this study applies Jane Roland Martin’s theories of education as encounter (2011), education as a lifelong series of culture crossings (2006), and education as the transmission of both cultural liabilities and assets (2002) to curriculum theorizing from women’s cancer narratives as educational autobiographies (Couser, 1997; Lorber and Moore, 2002; Frank, 2013; Dewey, 1916; Pinar, 1975; Franzosa, 1992; Martin, 2011; Laird 2017, 2018). Informed also by analyses of modes of body discipline and conditions affecting the well-being of bodies in communities (Foucault 1982; Friedman, 1989; Bartky, 1990; Young, 1994; Butler 2006; Shusterman 2008; Warren 2011), this textual study focuses upon the U.S. “cancer-industrial complex” (Ehrenreich, 2001), the conglomeration of medical and research institutions, government and nonprofit agencies, and commercial corporations that shape patient and public health education for women with breast and gynecological cancers (BGC) as a “pink war machine” that fosters cisgender heteronormativity and gender subordination (GS). Education for GS includes three practices—“pink commerce,” medical authoritarianism, and “pink narratives”—which compel BGC patients’ conformity to gender norms, violate their bodies, suppress their voices, and limit and distort their learning.
This textual study theorizes “Gender Insubordination” (GI) from close reading of eight autobiographical narratives (Campion, 1972; Kushner, 1975; Rollin, 1976; Lorde, 1980; Lucas, 2004; Ho, 2006; Steingraber, 2010; Gubar, 2012) that voice women’s critical responses to gender-subordinating, pink war training. This study’s thesis is that GI is a self-educating practice, and collectively, that GI narratives can serve as counter-curriculum for revealing, resisting, and redressing pink-war-machine miseducation. Women’s diverse narratives express GI educational thought of three kinds: emergent, instigative/informer, and restorative/reformer. In all cases, four GI actions respond directly to gender-subordinating patient education: Refusing to comply with gender-normed behaviors, developing practices to listen to and sustain bodies, educating others to recognize pink war miseducation, and claiming voice for self-advocacy. Commending Dewey’s insight that education may enhance or harm health (1916), this study closes with a plea to broaden educational studies to apply its disciplines of interpretive, critical, and normative inquiry to health care as a site of vital teaching and learning
