Sharon Batt

I recently visited the website of a professor at UBC named Mary Bryson whom I had met some months ago through our common identities as one-time breast cancer patients, each of us now pursuing research on breast cancer in a university setting. Mary’s site (www.

queercancer.org) had a lot of intriguing links, including one that caught my eye titled, “Why I hate pink breast cancer crap and why queers should care.” I clicked it and soon found myself completely engaged by the writer’s passionate prose. When I reached the end, I was astonished to find that the writer, Erika Jahn, identified herself as working at BCAM as a Project Director.

I thought, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

This sent me off on a reverie about BCAM as it was, as it has become. Twenty years ago, when four of us began meeting in one another’s homes to talk about starting a political breast cancer group, the connections between queer women and breast cancer were not part of our discussions. Nor did we talk about “pink breast cancer crap” – a phenomenon, mercifully, still not yet dreamed up by marketers (little could we know that, simply by meeting, we were inadvertently helping to kick-start the very movement that would create the market for all that pink crap). So yes, a lot has changed. But BCAM is still recognizably the organization we dreamed of creating: a group that would challenge, question, and promote change; a group that would demand that attention be paid to prevention (two of the four of us had teenage daughters); a group that would bring our consciousness as feminists to the question of breast cancer.

In the years to come, we did all of those things. I’m so proud that BCAM is doing them still!

Sharon Batt is a co-founder of Breast Cancer Action Montreal and the author of Patient No More: the Politics of Breast Cancer. She moved to Halifax in 1999 where she is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on the breast cancer movement and funding from the pharmaceutical industry. She remains an enthusiastic supporter of BCAM and a member of its Advisory Board.