Gender, Health and Marginalization Through a Critical Feminist Lens

A woman shouts through a megaphone while holding a banner that says "Women's Rights=Human Rights."

Women stage a pro-choice counter-protest in opposition to a group of students that gathered to protest women's reproductive freedom in Ottawa. (Image courtesy of Jenn Farr on Flickr. License: CC NC-BY-SA.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

WGS.645

As Taught In

Fall 2014

Level

Graduate

Cite This Course

Course Description

Course Features

Course Description

In the course we will use a feminist interdisciplinary lens and invite students to look critically at how practices like privatization, shrinking public "safety nets", de-regulation, and the commodification of health services intersect inevitably with gender, race and class, for both men and women. We will draw on a blend of empirical studies, policy materials, films and guest speakers to examine specific health issues like menstrual health, corporate obstetrics, abortion, obesity, intersex, harassment and other forms of gendered violence, mental health and stress, parent-child attachment, as well as ethics and pharmaceuticals.

The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS)

This course is part of the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies. The GCWS at MIT brings together scholars and teachers at nine degree-granting institutions in the Boston area who are devoted to graduate teaching and research in Women's Studies and to advancing interdisciplinary Women's Studies scholarship. Learn more about the GCWS.

Related Content

Chris Bobel, Silvia Dominguez, and Lecturer Norma Swenson MPH. WGS.645 Gender, Health and Marginalization Through a Critical Feminist Lens. Fall 2014. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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