RACE IN AMERICAN OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY

MEDHIST 746

Examine ideas about race and ethnicity and their relationship to the history of "Western" medicine and science. Analyze the role of social, economic, cultural, and political developments in the shaping of scientific and medical notions of race and bodily difference. Study how skin color (and other elements of "racial identity") has influenced the experiences of patients and populations, physicians and nurses, and medical researchers. Discuss how conceptions of race have shaped both the health concerns and health outcomes of Americans in the past three hundred years, and the structure of medical institutions in the United States. Topics include the origins of racial classification, race and colonialism, the health and medical care of the enslaved, the use of enslaved people as research subjects, the history of racial disparities in medicine, structural racism of the medical establishment, race and reproduction, and the struggle for justice in health care during the past few decades.

AFROAMER/GEN&WS 323

Historical interplay of racism and sexism in the lives of Black and White women of different class backgrounds in the United States.

GEN&WS 524

Uses race and gender theoretical frameworks to understand peoples' experiences with health and medicine. Conceptualizes race and gender as social categories and applies these frameworks to how people experience health, wellness, and disease. Examines how healthcare and medicine are structured according to racialized and gendered frameworks. Surveys a wide range of issues including reproductive health, body size, mental health, COVID, among other topics. Uses an intersectional approach to analyzing key debates in scholarship on health and medicine.

GEN&WS 529

Explores the contemporary science and politics of reproductive health in North America. Taught from a reproductive justice (RJ) perspective, a framework for analysis and action developed by Black women health organizers and scholars. Examines several aspects and applications of the reproductive justice framework itself; RJ approaches to pregnancy and birth; RJ as a diagnosis and refusal of eugenics; and RJ and abortion. Engages with case studies, scholarship, and theory from a variety of literatures relevant to public health: epidemiology, feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, gender/sexuality studies, activist and policy analyses, and historical and contemporary primary sources. Explores a variety of experiences and meanings of reproductive health and illness, as well as the relationships between health/disease and racism, poverty, sexism, hetero- and cis- normativity, colonization, incarceration, and environmental degradation.

GEN&WS/HISTSCI 537

Using a reproductive justice framework, analyze contexts, experiences, practices, ideologies, and historiographies of childbirth in the United States from roughly the 17th century to the present, with the heaviest emphasis on the 20th and 21st century. Examines the ways that colonization, genocide, enslavement, racism, capitalism, heterosexism, patriarchy, and ableism have shaped all of these aspects of childbirth. Inquire how key movements and groups resisting some of these forms of oppression have had the power to reshape birth, as well as locating in birth a source of transformational power.