Women, Gender, Sexuality 392F - S-Feminist Engagements/Biomed

In this class we will explore how deeply biomedicine and concerns around it are premised on assumptions about the nature of difference. Through the lenses of disability, critical race, and queer feminisms, we will explore conceptions of health and ethics in the overlapping fields of feminist body theory, science studies, bioethics and health movements. The course will revolve around a series of questions that arise when we think/talk/write across disciplines, genres, and settings about what it means to engage biomedical constructions of and engagements with difference from a feminist perspective. These questions include (but are not limited to): What is biology? What is "the body"? What is ethics? What is health? What is science? What is feminism? What are the relationships among these concepts? We will explore a range of types and expressions of ethical concern with the body and with bio-medical inquiry and practice. Through interdisciplinary inquiry we will begin to map ethical questions and frameworks being proposed, debated and institutionalized across and beyond the academy with regard to the status and practice of biomedicine. In the first two sections of the course, "Feminists Theorize the Body, Embodiment, and Bio-Ethics" and "Difference as/and Illness," we will build a shared set of theoretical tools and language for thinking, talking, and writing about "the body", biology, ethics, and difference. In the final section of the class we will look in depth at "gynecology" as a site of feminist engagement with biomedicine. Drawing on a wide variety of feminist engagements, we will touch on a wide range of topics from trans health issues to menopause to intersex treatment to sexual dysfunction.

Prior coursework in WGSS required.