Feminist and Anti-Racist Critiques of Medicine [5-weeks, $300 Suggested]
Instructor: Andrews | Mondays January 30-February 27 | 6:30-8:30 PM ET | ONLINE
We are primed to think of medicine as a noble profession: objective science wielded to help us all live healthy, fulfilling lives. But if we take a cultural view of medicine—looking at it through the humanities lenses of history, literature, arts, philosophy, and anthropology—we see that medicine has a complicated past, one in which medical knowledge has been shaped by the dehumanizing “knowledge” of race science, patriarchal beliefs about women, normalizing taxonomies of sexology, and moralizing ideas about the poor. In fact, as it turns out, “health” is far from a neutral category—instead, it is one that has been used to shape the social order, and is intimately tied to disciplinary apparatuses, the carceral system, and economic dispossession. Over the course of five weeks, we’ll examine how the contemporary medical system came into being and how it’s changed since the 18th century. We’ll read novels, personal essays, and case studies that highlight how cultural ideas about race, gender, and class have both shaped medicine, and conversely, been influenced by it. We’ll ask how medicine benefited from experiments on enslaved people, how obstetrics became the purview of primarily male doctors, and how sexology was wrapped up in non-consensual “normalizing” surgeries. We’ll also take a look at how hygiene laws criminalized the poor and how the rhetoric of public health helped fuel mass incarceration through the war on drugs. Finally, we’ll think about how medical professions have carried forward these racialized, gendered, and classed legacies, and ask how some healthcare professionals and activists are working to change them. Authors considered will range widely, including: Tressie McMillan Cottom, William Burroughs, Michel Foucault, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Silvia Federici, Robert J. Lifton, Michelle Murphy, Katrina Karkzis, Erving Goffman, Octavia Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Harriet Washington, Alondra Nelson, and Carl Hart, among others.
[Image: Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital]
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Due to limited scholarship funds, we are currently only able to offer one class per term at the full scholarship level to any individual student—if you need a full scholarship, please sign up for the class you most want to take and email us to waitlist for any additional classes. We will add you when funds become available. Direct student donations are a crucial aspect of our funding model, and without them, we are not able to pay instructors a living wage. We encourage you to pick the payment tier that corresponds with your needs, but ask that you please consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out or you would like to pay tuition on an installment basis, please email us directly, and we will work with you.
If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.