Treating Gender and Illness Together in the Classroom

Abstract

With an M.A. and Ph.D. in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and with areas of specialization in medical/health humanities and disability studies, the author’s training, research, and teaching are inter- or transdisciplinary all the way down. Drawing on multiple interdisciplinary backgrounds, the author discusses ways of treating illness and disability in the classroom as women, gender, and sexuality might be treated: as categories of analysis that come into being through a multiplicity of archives, discourses, practices, and institutions. Rather than stabilize and consecrate an object as belonging to a particular field, the author is more interested in attending to the histories, methods, and political factors that bring objects and whole fields into being and sustaining or transforming them. The chapter discusses specific practical, even personal, pedagogical tactics and strategies.