Staying Alive: Queer & Feminist Interventions on Illness & Disability from the AIDS Crisis to the Coronavirus Pandemic - Detailseite

Queer and feminist theories have produced robust contributions to critical interventions on health, illness and disability, from critiquing gendered binaries at the core of biomedical knowledge to challenging exclusionary and dualistic models of mind and body. This seminar offers an overview of these contributions from the AIDS crisis onwards with a broad focus on transnational North American contexts. We will discuss a variety of foundational texts (including historical, autobiographical, and philosophical perspectives) alongside recent responses to the coronavirus pandemic while engaging with debates about the production and circulation of biomedical knowledge; issues of autonomy, care and patient choice; and embodied experiences of chronic illness, disability and vulnerability.

Audre Lorde. A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde. Firebrand Books, 1988.

Paula Treichler. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Duke University Press, 1999.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia University Press, 1997.

Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (Editors). Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. NYU Press, 2010.

There will be a monthly Zoom session. The rest of the seminar will be taught in an asynchronous format over Moodle.