Race, Gender, and Medicine: Social Justi

Why is racism so prevalent in hospitals and other health care settings? What unique challenges do trans and gender-diverse youth face as a result of recent transphobic laws and policies? How are community organizers advocating for the end of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention facilities? How do efforts to decolonize museums connect with grassroots struggles for environmental justice? In a (largely) seminar format, we will explore these questions and many others. By centering issues of gender, race, and sexuality, political approaches to medicine and public health challenge and expand contemporary debates in the medical humanities. This class provides an overview of the theoretical landscape and social movements that ground recent developments in the field, especially as it engages feminist theory, disability justice movements, critical race theory, queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and trans liberation movements. Special attention is paid to the structuring force of anti-Blackness in various clinical and research settings, the development and racialization of transgender medicine, and what it means to view state violence as an issue in public health and the medical humanities. The course will feature a key experiential learning component that includes visits to the American Museum of Natural History, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and key sites where the Young Lords and Black Panther Party engaged in community health organizing.