Critical Social Thought 349BT - Race, Disability, and Illness

This course examines the intersections of race, disability, illness, and health using literature and culture as primary sites of engagement. Looking to writers like Audre Lorde, Anna Deavere Smith, Mia Mingus, Harriet Jacobs, and Indra Sinha, it asks how structures of racial, environmental, and economic inequity transform the category of disability, which critics have primarily defined in terms of whiteness. It also considers alternate conceptions of health--models that do not align with mandates of productivity or normative embodiment--offered by the texts under consideration, and asks what political/ social liberation might look like when able-bodiedness is no longer privileged.