Gender, Sexuality, and Health (332-0-20)
Topic
Health Activism
Instructors
Amy Ruth Partridge
847.491.5872
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-420: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM
Overview of class
Topic: Health Activism.
Issues of health and disease were inextricably entangled with politics during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Scientific recommendations, public health mandates, and the role of institutions from the CDC and the FDA to the WHO were subject to heated debate and partisan politics. Meanwhile, the pandemic also made newly visible and further exacerbated ongoing health disparities within the U.S. and globally. Simultaneously, social movement demands for "healing justice" (Black Lives Matter), the "freedom to thrive" (BYP 100) and the "right to live" (Poor People's Campaign. #FreeThemAll) articulate "health" and "healing" to projects of collective liberation requiring radical social change, building on (and contributing to) a tradition of radical health activism in the U.S..
In this course, we explore this tradition of radical health activism in the U.S. through a series of case studies from the 1960s to the present including: the establishment of community health centers during the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Party/Rainbow Coalition "survival programs," feminist self-help clinics and underground abortion services pre-Roe v Wade, the 1970s anti-psychiatry movement, ACT UP and AIDS activism, reproductive rights activism post-Roe and ongoing efforts to secure reproductive rights/justice post-Dobbs. In each case, we make use of oral histories and interviews with movement participants and/or archival collections of activist materials in addition to recent scholarship to explore how activists frame the problem of ill health, contest contemporaneous scientific and medical models and protocols, interrogate ongoing "health disparities" and the ideological assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, and class that inform (and are often used to justify) these disparities, and build counter-institutions that enact a radical health politics. In our final unit (and throughout too), we explore the politics of the present, examine current movements that build on and carry forward this legacy of activism, and reflect on our collective experience(s) of a global pandemic.
Evaluation Method
2 in-class presentations using archival materials and oral history collections
2 short (2-4-page) papers
Final research/position paper or final group project
Class Materials (Required)
Sarah Shulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (2021); Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (2011); Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (1995)
Class Attributes
Social & Behavioral Sciences Distro Area