Twin Cities Breast Cancer 3Day

What: The 3Day- A three day event to raise awareness and donations for Breast Cancer, sponsored by and benefiting the Susan G. Komen foundation. Participants each raise at least $2300 and walk 60 miles around the Twin Cities over the course of the weekend, returning to a base camp each night. Volunteer crew members also work for these three days on many different teams to keep the event and camp running smoothly.
When: September 18-21st
Where: The walk travels throughout the Twin Cities, the camp is in Woodbury (a suburb of Minneapolis)

Almost four thousand people participated in the Twin Cities Breast Cancer 3Day this year, including my 21-year-old sister Hannah and I. Although we weren’t walking in the event, we are planning on walking in the event together next year and we were crew members on the Camp Logistics team this year! Camp Logistics duties are based in manual labor and include setting up hundreds of chairs and tables around the camp, but our main duty was hauling huge trash bags to the dumpsters and making sure the trash bins were empty and available. Our team was led by a woman and made up of 15 people, only three of them men. This ratio is common at the 3Day, an event that is very woman-positive and empowering, an event that benefits a cancer that affects mostly women, an event where everything possible is pink, including the signs, the yoga mats for stretching tired muscles and the sea of thousands of small tents that each walker and crew member sleep in. The 3Day celebrates women’s power, their lives and their achievements, but male crew members are still able to approach women who are successfully doing heavy lifting, rob them of their agency and make assumptions about their physical ability based on their gender by admonishing them for attempting tasks that are “too hard for you, sweetie.” Even my female crew captain, who had spent the year preparing and planning to lead us, allowed the few males on our team to freely and openly undermine her experience and authority and direct their dominant-male version of our labor. I spent a lot of my downtime on this event talking with my sister and interpreting the event through a feminist lens, and became convinced of the complete masculinization of manual labor watching my fellow female team members become equally frustrated and keep silent about it. I saw them engage in catty behavior, trash talking each other (literally while pitching full garbage bags into huge green dumpsters) because so-and-so wasn’t pulling their weight or was trying to be overbearing, but ignoring the gendered power plays. This event focuses on preserving women’s inherent female characteristics, their breasts!, while enforcing gender stereotypes and rewarding the few male participants for feeling comfortable wearing the requisite pink flare. The aggressive behavior of the men on my team made me feel uncomfortable expressing my opinion about the best way to delegate tasks and lifting folding chairs became a space to prove physical worth and ability. As a woman trying to enter a field dominated by men, if not in numbers but in behavior and tradition, I couldn’t help but get angry when the few men who walked in the event or who were on the Dining Services or Camp Services teams were celebrated for their willingness and bravery to enter a woman-dominated field. This contrast is especially important given the physical nature of the event, and the mental and physical strength and endurance that some women uncover during their 60-mile journey is incredible and inspiring. I just wish I had been able to support their experience with similar strength by standing up to my male cohorts and formulated my feminist-lens thoughts into effective articulations to challenge the norm of masculine power and dominance amid the sea of pink.

The first picture is of the whole team and our vehicles, the second picture is of me in the fake mustache some of us donned to celebrate "Spaghetti Dinner Night." Only one or two of the women on the team participated in this.