230163 SE Practicing Difference Science, Medicine, and Gender (2012S)

Cultural processes have profoundly shaped knowledge about humanness, health, and even our understanding of 'nature' itself. This course explores how distinctions between people have been generated in the biological sciences and in biomedicine. Specifically, it investigates how biological differences - construed around an axis of gender, sex, and sexuality have been constructed, employed, practiced and embodied inside and outside the worlds of the laboratory and the clinic.
The course will be structured in three major parts. The first part introduces the historical development of the idea that sex is pervasive and explores the changing sites where sex is thought to be situated in the body (sex glands, hormones, chromosomes, the brain) and how these parts become sexed. The second and third parts relies on specific examples to show how these differences are put into practice, and the effects they have on medical care, public health policies, identity and community, popular conceptions of behavior and on biological citizenship.