Support the Prostates of Québec!

To the right is a low-quality photograph of an ad currently in circulation in the Montreal metro system. Its purpose is to encourage Montrealers to contribute money in support of research on and treatment of prostate cancer. The slogan at the top says 'Support the Prostates from Here!', which is to say from Québec, the prostates of Quebeckers. The image below is a sort of athletic cup adorned with a Québécois fleur-de-lys, atop which floats a circle that, in a stroke of graphic genius, seems to represent a halo and an elastic waistband at once. 

The slogan plays on a common plea often found in connection with fruits, cheeses, and other foodstuffs produced in the province: 'Soutenez les x d'ici', is, for any x, a way of saying 'Buy Québécois', support the provincial (or, depending how you see it, national) economy through your spending habits. 

The slogan also, in taking 'prostate' as a possible value of 'x', takes the reproductive systems of Québécois men as part of the total Québécois system of production, alongside the production of cheese and foie gras, and sees all of this production as contributive to national health and well-being, understood in the broad sense here in which these overlap with national pride and glory. 

Obviously, this ad inscribes itself in a long history of cross-hybridity between public health and nationalism. Alison Bashford argues fairly convincingly in her Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health of 2004 that large-scale public-health campaigns are in fact an ineliminable feature of modern projects of constructing national identity. 

What is particularly interesting here, though, is that the ad updates the old formula, in its echoing of the broader North American society's current preoccupation with defeating cancer through orchestrated, mass-scale public gestures of charity, and moreover does so with a pseudo-risqué wink and with a self-conscious, jocular avowal that in this day and age our body parts are not so much like cogs in the great national machine, as one might have seen in early Soviet vaccination propaganda, as they are like vendable commercial goods. 

Comments

[The Necromancer]

This is Quebec at its super-nationalist best...

[Gallbladder Cancer Symptoms]

Doctors generally treat cancer of the gallbladder that has come back (recurred) in the same way as stage 3 or 4 gallbladder cancer. But your treatment will depend on whether you have had radiotherapy or surgery in the past. And on where your cancer has come back. There is a maximum amount of radiotherapy that you can have to any one part of your body. If you have too much it can cause damage to healthy body tissues. So if you have had radiotherapy before, you may not be able to have it again.

[www.creativebioscience.com]

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