3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course invites students to take the perspectives of women, gender and sexuality studies in the study of illness and disease. The course asks: What difference do such perspectives make in the study of disease? Are ways of describing and responding to illness and suffering made available for us to rethink the experience of affliction as such? The course will invite students to consider disease, illness, and suffering as embedded within social worlds and as sites where institutions, medical knowledge, and intimacy are entangled. We will explore topics including: the gender politics of asylum, displacement and refugeehood; the clustering of violence and illness in neighborhoods marked by chronic exposure to police violence; the counter-politics of care in the context of claims to reproductive justice; the politics of the population and the household decision-making in relation to scarcity; the rethinking of the clinical encounter as it is criss-crossed by law in cases of sexual violence.