Endangered Butts and CoverMe: Pieties of Preparedness in Cancer Awareness

• In Event: Humour As Topic, Discourse and Method For STS

Abstract

This paper argues that critical illness insurance marketing and cancer awareness campaigns instruct their audiences that the way to prepare for a critical illness—specifically, cancer—is through awareness practices: knowing about one’s risk, what medical technologies are available, and where to find additional information. These awareness practices are, in the terms of Kenneth Burke, rhetorical pieties: they provide a sense of what behaviours and actions are pious and right. Through a comparative analysis of rhetorical pieties, I show that the exigence—the issue that prompts speech—of these marketing campaigns is not cancer itself but unpreparedness. In other words, the goal of these campaigns is not cancer awareness but cancer preparedness.
This paper compares the pieties of two sites. First, I address Colorectal Cancer Canada’s “Endangered Butts” campaign. Although this campaign relies on pieties of cancer awareness, it uses enthymeme, euphemism, and humor to distance itself from figures of disease and death, and to appeal to what Christopher Deurringer calls a “thanatophobic public,” or a public with a fear of death. Second, I turn to Canadian insurance provider Manulife Financial's critical illness insurance, CoverMe, and its cultivation of anxiety about surviving cancer in a context of scarcity; the solution to this anxiety is presented as purchasing critical illness insurance.
I align myself with a handful of scholars who have shown that campaigns aiming to educate publics about the dangers of breast cancer (Ehrenreich, Segal, Pezzullo, King, Jain, Gardner, Deurringer) also work to praise and vilify different subjectivities, reify gendered and racialized stereotypes, and reinforce individuals’ culpabilities in illnesses. While these scholars have taken seriously the effects that breast cancer awareness has on shaping cultural understandings of breast cancer, public campaigns urging awareness of other kinds of cancer have received relatively little attention. I contribute to a growing body of scholarship on the rhetoric of health and medicine by making explicit the link between cancer awareness and insurance marketing to understand (to play the title of Segal’s [2011] analysis of pharmaceutical ads) what, in addition to cancer awareness, do such campaigns sell?

Author

• Loren Gaudet, University of British Columbia