Intersectionality and Centering Voices in Bioethics: Disability, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

BETH 762 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This interdisciplinary seminar examines how disability, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference structure access to health, autonomy, dignity, and civil and human rights. Using disability studies and disability law alongside feminist, queer, and critical race bioethics, students will explore how social and legal systems conceptualize and regulate bodies and minds, and how stigma, anti-Blackness, racism, ableism, cisnormativity, and heteronormativity shape clinical practice, research, and public policy. Topics include contested understandings of autonomy and personhood, the social and legal treatment of disabled people, the development and racialization of transgender medicine, and the framing of state violence as a bioethics and public health issue.

Grounded in intersectionality as an analytic of power and structures of domination - not merely identity - the course traces the emergence of intersectional resistance movements and collective struggles for health justice. Students will examine engagements between bioethics and critical race theory, feminism, Marxism, disability justice, religion, migrant justice, and queer and trans liberation, with particular attention to Indigenous perspectives in Africa and the Americas. Through close reading of scholarship, legal and policy documents, first-person narratives, and case studies - supplemented by films and other media - students will critically assess both the promises and tensions of intersectional approaches in contemporary bioethics. The seminar format emphasizes short lectures, collaborative discussion, and structured group work to foster rigorous, collegial dialogue about difficult and controversial issues, and to equip students to envision more just and inclusive bioethical practices.