IntroductionMale breast cancer (MBC) is a rare disease and little is known about its aetiology. However, female first-degree relatives of MBC cases are at increased risk of breast cancer [1][2][3][4][5][6], which suggests that there is an inherited component to the disease. Several genes that are associated with a high lifetime risk of breast cancer in women have been identified during the past decade. One of these, BRCA2, has also been shown to confer a significant risk of breast cancer in men, and a recent study found the risk of breast cancer in male BRCA2 mutation carriers from multiple case breast/ovarian cancer families to be 80-fold higher than in the general population [7]. This equates to a 7% risk of breast cancer by age 80. The CI = confidence interval; MBC = male breast cancer; PCR = polymerase chain reaction; SSCA/HA = single strand conformation analysis/heteroduplex analysis.Available online http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/4/1/R2 Abstract Background: The contribution of BRCA1 and BRCA2 to the incidence of male breast cancer (MBC) in the United Kingdom is not known, and the importance of these genes in the increased risk of female breast cancer associated with a family history of breast cancer in a male first-degree relative is unclear. Methods: We have carried out a population-based study of 94 MBC cases collected in the UK. We screened genomic DNA for mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 and used family history data from these cases to calculate the risk of breast cancer to female relatives of MBC cases. We also estimated the contribution of BRCA1 and BRCA2 to this risk. Results: Nineteen cases (20%) reported a first-degree relative with breast cancer, of whom seven also had an affected second-degree relative. The breast cancer risk in female first-degree relatives was 2.4 times (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.4-4.0) the risk in the general population. No BRCA1 mutation carriers were identified and five cases were found to carry a mutation in BRCA2. Allowing for a mutation detection sensitivity frequency of 70%, the carrier frequency for BRCA2 mutations was 8% (95% CI = 3-19). All the mutation carriers had a family history of breast, ovarian, prostate or pancreatic cancer. However, BRCA2 accounted for only 15% of the excess familial risk of breast cancer in female first-degree relatives. Conclusion: These data suggest that other genes that confer an increased risk for both female and male breast cancer have yet to be found.

British Legion's Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of 'communities of feeling', through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their 'place' in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular 'protectors' necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised 'protected'. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.Keywords: gender; race; everyday militarism; remembrance; emotion Though war is often framed as a state activity, the ability of liberal democracies to wage war requires some normalisation in more everyday settings. There must necessarily be some 'emotional energy within the polity' that incites at least some citizens to volunteer to 'defend the security of the state under threat' through military service, and wider citizen support for military power that enables the forfeiting of 'income to taxes' by 'free' individuals in pursuit of collective security (Berezin 2002, 39, 36). In the UK, that emotional energy relies on the drawing of racial and gendered boundaries. Although thousands of West Indians and Indians fought for Britain in the Second World War for example, 'this fact hardly registers in public memory'; instead, the war is celebrated as exemplifying the best of Churchill's (white) 'island race' Soldiers do not of course 'fall' in battle; they are maimed, and they maim; they are eviscerated and they eviscerate; they bleed and make bleed; they are killed and they kill. However, designating soldiers as 'the fallen', and their deaths as sacrifices, enables mourning and remembrance to be separated out from military violence. In this article I therefore examine how contemporary British acts of remembrance serve to reproduce war as a matter of sacrifice and in so doing, work to erase the violence, done to and by the bodies they commemorate and celebrate.Focusing on the RBL's annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the 'everyday', and its sites and materialities, animates the geopolitical and vice versa. Moreover, I suggest that remembrance's ability to 'localise' war deaths, as interpersonal, emotional experiences of collective mourning and sacrifice (Till 2005), is heavily reliant on gendered and racial geopolitical logics, where sacrifice becomes a regrettable but necessary burden for the white, muscular, masculinist British state, threatened by irrational enemy others. At the same time, remembrance, as a public political and everyday ritual, enables 'communities of feeling' to emerge which can 'serve as arenas ...

The use and maintenance of military force as a means of achieving security makes the identity and continued existence of states as legitimate protectors of populations intelligible. In liberal democracies, however, where individual freedom is the condition of existence, citizens have to be motivated to cede some of that freedom in exchange for security. Accordingly, liberal militarism becomes possible only when military action and preparedness become meaningful responses to threats posed to the social body, not just the state, meaning that it relies on co-constitutive practices of the geopolitical and the everyday. Through a feminist discursive analysis of British airstrikes in Syria and attendant debates on Syrian refugees, I examine how liberal militarism is animated through these co-constitutive sites, with differential effects. Paying particular attention to gender and race, I argue that militarism is an outcome of social practices characterized as much by everyday desires and ambivalence as by fear and bellicosity. Moreover, I aim to show how the diffuse and often uneven effects produced by liberal militarism actually make many liberal subjects less secure. I suggest therefore that despite the claims of liberal states that military power provides security, for many militarism is insecurity.

The feminized imaginary of "home and hearth" has long been central to the notion of soldiering as masculinist protection. Soldiering and war are not only materialized by gendered imaginaries of home and hearth though, but through everyday labors enacted within the home. Focusing on in-depth qualitative research with women partners and spouses of British Army reservists, we examine how women's everyday domestic and emotional labor enables reservists to serve, constituting "hearth and home" as a site through which war is made possible. As reservistswho are still overwhelmingly heterosexual menbecome increasingly called upon by the state, one must consider how the changing nature of the Army's procurement of soldiers is also changing demands on women's labor. Feminist IPE scholars have shown broader trends in the outsourcing of labor to women and its privatization. Our research similarly underscores the significance of everyday gendered labor to the geopolitical. Moreover, we highlight the fragility of military power, given that women can withdraw their labor at any time. The article concludes that paying attention to women's everyday labor in the home facilitates greater understanding of one of the key sites through which war is both materialized and challenged.

Several studies have investigated polymorphisms in CYP1A1 and breast cancer risk with inconsistent results. We have carried out a population based case-control study of the Thr461Asn and Ile462Val polymorphisms in CYP1A1 to clarify their importance in determining breast cancer susceptibility. A total of 1873 cases and 712 controls were genotyped for Thr461Asn and 1948 cases and 1355 controls were genotyped for Ile462Val. We have also investigated a putative interaction between smoking and CYP1A1 genotype and breast cancer risk using a case only study design. The genotype distribution of Thr461Asp in controls was close to that expected under Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE). We detected no significant differences in genotype frequencies between breast cancer cases and controls (P = 0.68). Compared with the Thr/Thr homozygotes there was no significant risk for either the Thr/Asp heterozygote [OR = 1.1 (95% CI 0.8-1.4)] or the Asp/Asp homozygote [OR = 0.4 (0.02-6.1)]. The genotype distribution of Ile462Val in controls was also close to that expected under HWE with no significant differences between breast cancer cases and the controls (P = 0.44). No significant risk was found for either the Ile/Val heterozygote [OR = 0.8 (0.6-1.1)] or the Val/Val homozygote [OR = 2.7 (0.3-24)] compared with the Ile/Ile homozygotes. Furthermore, subgroup analyses revealed no effect of age or menopausal status on genotypic risks, and we found no evidence for an interaction between genotype and smoking habit or alcohol consumption and susceptibility to breast cancer. We combined our data for the Ile462Val polymorphism with those from four other published studies, but even with >5000 subjects, none of the genotype-associated risks achieved statistical significance, and there was no consistent pattern to the risks associated with increasing Val allele dosage [Ile/Val OR = 0.9 (0.7-1.1), Val/Val OR = 2.3 (0.4-12), and Val carrier OR = 1.0 (0.9-1.1)].