Living with a White Disease: Women of Colour & Their Engagement with Breast Cancer Information

This paper contends that breast cancer information is written for a dominant, ‘ideal’ patient, who is white, Canadian-born, middle class and middle aged. We draw on the results of a study that examined the perspectives of women of colour and immigrant women on mainstream breast cancer information. This study found that racially marginalized women are excluded from the dominant discourse around breast cancer and that they do not see their identities, concerns and cultures reflected in cancer information materials. Yet, we suggest that there is more at stake than simply exclusion when some women are marginalized. We employ Homi Bhabha’s work on ‘mimicry’ to examine the complex ways in which participants engaged with the information studied. The discursive construction of a dominant patient/woman suggests to women of colour that they must behave and become more like this dominant figure in order to cope with their cancer and to get well