Product Description

The feminist womens health movement of the 1960s and 1970s is credited with creating significant changes in the healthcare industry and bringing womens health issues to public attention. Decades later, womens health issues are more visible than ever before, but that visibility is made possible by a process of depoliticizationassesses the state of womens healthcare today by analyzing popular media representationstelevision, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirsin order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life. From narratives about prophylactic mastectomies to young girls receiving a vaccine for sexually transmitted disease, the representations of womens health today form a single restrictive identity: the vulnerable empowered woman. This identity defuses feminist notions of collective empowerment and social change by drawing from both postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies. The woman is vulnerable because of her very femininity and is empowered not to change the world, but to choose from among a limited set of medical treatments.