Cultural Critiques of Medicine: Feminist & Anti-Racist Approaches [Durham, NC]
**This course is in-person only. There is no virtual component. Participants must be age 21+
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Andrews | 5 Weeks | Thursdays | February 8 - March 7 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM ET | IN-PERSON, 719 N. Mangum St., Durham, NC
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 Karkazis, Erving Goffman, Octavia Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Harriet Washington, Alondra Nelson, and Carl Hart, among others.
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Sliding Scale: Night School Bar pays instructors and staff a living wage, and your tuition goes toward supporting this practice. Please pick the payment tier that corresponds to your needs, and consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We will never request or require proof of need, and do not use an income-based sliding scale; we trust you to decide what payment tier is right for you. If you would like additional support deciding or would like to learn more about the practice of using a sliding scale, we recommend this resource from Embracing Equity.
Scholarships: We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class. Our full scholarship tier is a nonrefundable offering, limited to one per student per month. Because our scholarship funding is limited, selecting multiple full scholarships in a single month will result in disenrollment from all classes. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out please email us directly, and we will add you to a waitlist and notify you if additional scholarships become available. Please see our FAQ for more information, including installment plans and refund policy.