Tasha N. Dubriwny

Informed lay preferences for delivery of racially varied pharmacogenomics

Objectives To understand public perceptions and opinions of three options for prescribing medicine: individualized genetic testing, race-based prescription, and traditional prescription.Methods Focus groups in urban, suburban, and rural communities over-sampled for minority groups conducted from February through April, 2001 in Georgia.Results Group members (N = 102) identified individualized genetic testing as providing the best quality of care (60% of talk turns; 75% in postdiscussion anonymous survey), but stipulated the need for protection from the invasion of privacy, discrimination, and prohibitive cost. Most individuals chose genetic testing because it provided individualized attention, and African-Americans indicated they would choose genetic testing even if the costs were high. Overall, individuals were suspicious of race-based prescription. Analyses for degree of suspicion revealed a main effect for race and an interaction effect for race and gender.Conclusions If issues of cost, discrimination, and privacy are addressed, lay individuals prefer genetic testing as the basis for prescription of medicines that exhibit racially patterned response variation.

Television News Coverage Of Postpartum Disorders and the Politics of Medicalization

This article argues that although postpartum disorders can potentially disrupt the hegemonic discourse of essential/good motherhood, as represented in television news, such disorders are domesticated by the use of news routines and are defined as “real” diseases that are temporary disruptions in womens natural ability to mother. This understanding of postpartum disorders not only engages in a process of medicalizing what is often a social problem, but also reifies a particularly harmful understanding of motherhood. Television news coverage exemplifies the problematic ideological baggage attached to the diagnoses of postpartum depression and psychosis, and demonstrates the need for more diverse reporting of womens health issues.

Constructing Breast Cancer in the News: Betty Ford and the Evolution of the Breast Cancer Patient

In this article, the author explores a key moment in breast cancer history—the publicity surrounding Betty Fords radical mastectomy in 1974—and points to the ways in which the print news coverage of Fords mastectomy offers an identity, or subject position, for breast cancer patients that is constrained by stereotypical gender roles, particularly the need for breast cancer patients to maintain their femininity. Betty Ford is articulated as an “ideal patient” within a medical success narrative that tells a story of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in a progressive, linear fashion that minimizes the complexity of breast cancer as a disease and the questions surrounding best treatment practices. The aestheticization of breast cancer in the coverage of Betty Fords mastectomy is one of the primary discursive building blocks of the contemporary subjectivity of the breast cancer survivor.

Gender and Public Memory

Public memory scholars consistently argue that U.S. commemorative practices and traditions promote historical narratives that are inherently conservative in nature. This is particularly true of “official” sites of public memory like memorials and museums. The narratives celebrated in many public memory landscapes, in other words, are ones that are likely to support, not challenge, mainstream democratic values and figures by working to “solidify national, cultural and community identities by shaping collective imaginings.” These sites rehearse key aspects of American mythology, including a national dedication to equality, liberty, work, sacrifice, ingenuity, and heroism. Wittingly or not, these “places of public memory” are likely to mask foundational commitments to white heterosexual male supremacy, class hierarchies, and the systemic violence used to secure them. In short, the embodiment of the American identity in commemorative sites is, more often than not, a white heterosexual cisgendered male, reaffirming the “great man” perspective that dominated American historiography for too long. Communication scholars have challenged these trends by offering analyses that describe the stakes of the distinctly partial understanding of U.S. history (and tragedy) in commemorative sites, mass-mediated texts, and or other diffuse practices of public memory. Scholarship in communication deploys a variety of textual and ethnographic methods to call much needed attention to, amongst other things, the lack of racial diversity (in terms of representation and perspective) in mainstream memory places, the lack of radical voices in promoted narratives, and the painstaking efforts to minimize any event that might disrupt the idea that the United States has a deep-seated commitment to democratic principles, human rights, and equality. Although all of this scholarship does remark, at times, on the relative absence of women from narratives and sites, the question of gender more generally and its role in public commemoration has yet to emerge as a sustained area of focus in communication public memory scholarship. Recognizing the importance of interrogating the role of gender in public memory practices and articulating the stakes of various constructions and exclusions, we hope the articles in this special issue will inspire a larger and sustained scholarly conversation about gender and public memory in communication studies. Indeed, this special issue of the Southern Communication Journal emerges from our interests in public memory practices of feminist and black freedom movements. In both individual and collaborative projects, we have asked not only where, how, and why are women represented and erased in these movements but also how gendered norms of public remembering contour memory sites. The contributors to this issue think through the role of gender in public memory in broader terms, each offering an analysis of a variety of unique sites of memory—for example, books, monuments, and documentaries—and interrogating the memory practices of institutions and collectives. Although our original call emphasized gender and public memory, all contributions focus on women specifically, and we would like to offer a few reflections on what this group of articles tells us about the “woman problem” of public memory. First, the articles speak volumes about the difficulties of remembering women without reducing women to their traditional gendered roles as wives, mothers, and (more generally) supportive