The Racial and Sexual Politics of Public Health

Race and sexuality have long been concerns of public health. From hygienic campaigns against Mexican immigrants in early-1900s California to the 1991 quarantine of Haitian refugees with HIV at Guantanamo Bay, race and sexuality have proven crucial to how society identifies health and, by extension, determines who is fit to be a citizen. This interdisciplinary course interrogates the intersections of race, sexuality, and medicine, discussing how each domain has been constitutive of the other in the American context. Via feminist and queer theorizing, we will examine the political and economic factors under which diseases, illnesses, and health campaigns have impacted racial and sexual minorities over the last two centuries. An orienting question for the course is the following: How has the state wielded public health as a regulatory site to legitimatize perceived racial differences and to regulate ostensible sexual deviations? Through primary and secondary sources, we will likewise explore the various forms of "health activism" undertaken by these very same targeted populations. Themes to be addressed will include the medicalization of racial and sexual difference; activism both in and against health institutions; and the roles of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in contemporary health issues. Case studies include the Tuskegee syphilis experiment; the sterilization of black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Native American women; the medicalization of homosexuality during the Cold War; and the role of mass incarceration in the diffusion of HIV. At a moment in time when access to health continues to be shaped by categories of social difference, understanding the role of public health in the normalization and subversion of racial and sexual hierarchies in the West is more pertinent than ever.
Course Attributes: EN S; BU BA; AS SSC; FA SSC; AR SSC; AS SC; AR SEP

The Racial and Sexual Politics of Public Health

MEDICAL HUMANITIES 3141

Section 01