Literature & Medicine (381-0-22)
Topic
Medicine, Race, and Gender
Instructors
Ilana Vine Larkin
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-325: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
We often think of the humanities and sciences as opposite pursuits. While the humanities seem to focus on subjectivity and feeling, we see the sciences as objective and fact-based. Yet, attending to the history of medicine demands a troubled acknowledgement that medical inquiry both shapes and is itself shaped by cultural assumptions about race and gender. Indeed, critics have pointed time and again to how the seeming impartiality of medical fact reveals biases about which kinds of bodies feel pain and who is prone to certain diseases, distinctions that have been assigned moral and social meaning. In this class, we will read literature about medical encounters in order to investigate how ideas about race and gender shape medical experiences. How do these individual accounts reflect larger structural injustices? What kinds of barriers and assumptions do women and people of color face when they attempt to receive treatment? What about people seeking gender affirming care? Beginning with the nineteenth century and moving towards the present day, we will examine the surprising history of how medical knowledge often depended on the exploitation of racialized bodies, grapple with the tangled enmeshment of femininity and illness, and explore how claims about medicalized bodies became a metric for citizenship.
Teaching Method
Seminar discussion.
Evaluation Method
Presentation, short papers, participation.
Class Materials (Required)
"The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (ISBN: 0061148512), The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (ISBN: 0143135201), Lakewood by Megan Giddings (ISBN: 0062913204), The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Dylan Scholinkski (ISBN: 9781573226967). Other readings and films available on Canvas.
Texts will be available at: Norris.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area