Gender and Disability

4.0 credits

Every day we rarely pause to consider how our understanding of what is ?normal? influences how we understand the present and how we imagine futures. This course centers the experiences of multiply-marginalized disabled people and introduces students to a transnational framework that considers how our thinking about disability is rooted in settler colonialism, Christian hegemony, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. From an intersectional, interdisciplinary multimedia perspective students will learn to critically examine the history of Western medicine, law, politics, and culture. This class offers a space in which we approach disabilities, from depression and anxiety to autism to spina bifida, as well as Deaf culture, chronic illnesses, body size, sexual orientation and gender identity, and many other forms of difference as complex sites of social expectations, personal experiences, state interventions, knowledge production, and exuberant life.