Race, Health, and the Politics of the Body

Catalog description

The body is central to theorizations of race and racism. This course will explore how bodies are produced, managed, and mobilized with a particular focus on the intersections between race, health, science, and medicine. We will examine how race and bodily difference are constructed through discourses and practices of health as well as how they are embodied and mobilized for social change. Topics of concern include but are not limited to: histories of scientific racism and eugenics, health inequalities, discourses of social pathology, cultural representations of the racialized body, and embodied knowledge/politics. This course is intentionally interdisciplinary in scope and will approach race, health, and the body from diverse fields including medical sociology, science and technology studies, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and disability studies.