Vulnerable Bodies: An Anthropology of Disability, Contested Illness, and the Politics of Legitimacy

ANTHRO 1708 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This seminar examines the cultural experiences and politics of disability and contested illness. Drawing on ethnography and academic scholarship alongside film and popular writing, it explores how bodies are shaped and rendered vulnerable across historical periods and social contexts. We move among distinct registers and scales, treating disability as an individual experience, a collective identity, a political movement, and a vantage point from which to probe cultural assumptions about productivity, intelligence, fitness, social value, and scientific/medical uncertainty. Opening the aperture wide, we will consider the roles of industrial toxins, pharmaceutical regimes, built environments, capitalist labor demands, war, and medical classification in the politics and experience of disability and contested illness. Even as the course seeks to trouble conventional binaries (medical versus social, personal versus political, for example), we will closely examine how these polarities are constructed and challenged. Organized largely historically, the seminar begins with the role of eugenics in consolidating long-standing ableist logics, as well as the movements that fought to dismantle them. It will trace how similar logics continue to resurface today across domains such as genetic screening, optimization culture, and immigration debates. We conclude with contemporary currents to examine the politics of chronic, contested, and difficult-to-define illnesses, such as long Covid, conditions linked to toxic exposures and other syndromes that establishment medicine has ignored or struggled to recognize, let alone treat. We will also briefly address the rise and appeal of alternative health approaches increasingly sought by patients seeking to manage these conditions at the periphery of establishment medicine. By addressing the history and contemporary struggles over disability, contested illness, and alternative care, the seminar centers on questions of bodily vulnerability and legitimacy to grapple with how societies value, manage, and sometimes sacrifice particular forms and ways of living and healing.