DISAB 5420 - Race, Disability, and Illness

How do some bodies and minds come to be seen as deviant or and others as normal? What makes some subjects worthy of care and others disposable? How have the rubrics of “health” and “treatment” historically operated to discipline black and brown bodies? This course approaches narratives of race, disability, and illness through the frameworks of critical disability, critical ethnic, and feminist-of-color studies. It explores how illness, debility, and precarity are produced in and as racial violence. We will consider the categories of health and illness as historical products of medical knowledge and practices, studying the legacies of scientific racism, medical experimentation, and reproductive control. We will also examine contemporary iterations of environmental racism, tracing forms of structural inequality and violence that targets people of color—namely those who are poor and working class, queer and gender non-conforming, women, and (im)migrants. Finally, it asks what legacies of resistance we might find in various forms of art and cultural production, as well as in movements for racial, economic, and disability justice. We will approach these questions through a range of critical essays, novels, poetry, artwork, and community engagement.