Gender, Race and Science

Catalog description

Is race biological? Do people of different genders really have different brains? As scholars of WGS, we are trained to seek out the social sources of difference between individuals or groups, and we often take for granted that race and gender are socially constructed. Yet, every day we hear of studies claiming that hormones, genes, or brains determine differences between men and women (and that those are the only choices) or among racial and ethnic groups. In this course students will learn how to think about these scientific claims using a framework of intersectionality as they explore gender, race, sexuality, science, and medicine. They will begin by examining how scientific thought about race and gender has changed over time, how it is socially and culturally influenced, and what is at stake in scientific practices of categorization. They continue by exploring how medical research has incorporated race and sex, as well as how medicine constitutes and acts on raced and gendered bodies. Students conclude with a consideration of genetics. Throughout these discussions, they will pay close attention to the processes through which knowledge is produced, to science as a practice and an institution, and to the question of who is provided with the power to “do science” and how this affects the knowledge produced. Ultimately, this course will cultivate an informed and reasoned openness to, and understanding of, difference and its relationship to power using a feminist framework. Further, this course will allow students to utilize and integrate information from multiple academic disciplines (WGS, History, Biology, Law, Sociology) to consider how science is not an objective field of study and has been fundamentally shaped by systems of privilege and power – directly impacting our understanding of and relationship to gender and race.