Lara Alahdeff, “Contemporary Protest: The Enduring Women’s Health Movement”
The nineteenth-century introduction of germ theory, which posits that infectious diseases are caused by a single, observable pathogen, allowed for the extensive elucidation and treatment of diseases. However, this long history of western biomedicine remains incomplete because of its exclusion of women from biomedical and pharmaceutical testing. This has created substantial gaps in the understanding of women’s health and their bodies. The refusal to take seriously women’s health, veiled by the rhetoric of its confounding nature, was exposed by the 1960s- and 1970s-Women’s Health Movements (WHM), in which gatherings of groups of women across the United States of America protested centuries long medical misogyny. However, the twenty-first century epidemic of chronic illnesses which predominantly affect women, such as Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS), marks these illnesses as a contemporary crisis in biomedicine. This presentation argues that women’s narrative representations of chronic illnesses, such as FMS, stage an enduring crisis in women’s healthcare mirroring the political will of the WHM. I suggest that women’s FMS narratives depict the persistent figuring of women with conditions such as FMS as ‘hysterical’ within the discourses of western biomedicine, which remain vested in dated theories of the womb and psychological instability. In insisting on the legitimacy of their corporeal suffering in their narrative portrayals of FMS, women’s chronic illness narratives reflect, not just a practice of care, but also a powerful disruption of the medical gaze, to borrow from Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic. Accordingly, these texts offer women an opportunity to resist the dismissive and lasting stigma of hysteria in twenty-first century biomedicine.
Megan Guzman, “Radical Care and Direct Action: The Forgotten Women of ACT UP/Atlanta”
This project is motivated by the dearth of information around the AIDS advocacy organization ACT UP, particularly in the south, as well as contemporary interest in effective organizing strategies. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars have increasingly focused on analyzing effective organizing strategies for radical social change, particularly in response to the continue growing crises around health, the environment, and failing governmental structures. In dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, both scholars and activists looked to past pandemics for historical inspiration, finding ACT UP as one model of successful, anti-hierarchical community organizing during a time of crisis. Members of ACT UP used multiple, simultaneous organizing strategies to support the survival of people with AIDS and pushed the U.S. government to redefine AIDS symptoms, fast-track experimental drugs, and set up needle exchanges across the country, among other success. This project focuses on women’s involvement in ACT UP, specifically their integral work campaigning at the CDC to broaden the symptomology of AIDS. The women of ACT UP’s commitment to direct action and radical care to each other across racial, class, and carceral statuses illustrates one successful framework for responding to crisis. I use the work of Sarah Schulman, a former member of ACT UP/NY, as well as primary sources from the Lesbian History Project to argue that women’s involvement in southern factions of ACT UP was integral to the organization’s success, and that these women’s political strategies should inform contemporary activists groups committed to collective liberation. The collective, direct action and radical community care exemplified by the women of ACT UP provide frameworks for contemporary organizing.
Grace Osusky, “Life and Death in a Southern Town”
The Southern United States experienced a surge in racially motivated violence in the early 20th century. Political, economic, and social policies that aimed to improve the lives of Black people during Reconstruction (1863-1877) were met with backlash from White Southerners during what became known as the Jim Crow era (1865-1967). While it is recognized that the lived experience of Black and White Southerners was dramatically different, demographic analyses of the health and survival consequences of discrimination are lacking during this period. Consequently, I seek to explore how changing social and political landscapes affect survival outcomes for Black and White individuals both during and after segregation. For this research, I use data collected on 6,831 individuals from death certificates of residents who lived and died in a small southern town between 1915-2015. Results from my analyses clearly demonstrate a dramatic life expectancy gap during the Jim Crow period that then significantly narrows with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. During segregation, life expectancy was ~55 years for White residents and ~43 for Black residents. Post-segregation, life expectancy increased for both groups (71 and 65 respectively) and the life expectancy gap shrank in half. Ultimately, while the explicitly racist policies of the Jim Crow period were repealed, structural racism has remained embedded within our cultural institutions in ways that perpetuate cycles of poorer health outcomes for Black Americans. However, findings presented here emphasize the consequences of legislative change on survival and the effects of a paradigmatic shift in social conditions on reducing health inequalities. While a survival gap is still present at the end of the time period under study here, my results highlight the potential for the continued promotion of policies that dismantle racial disenfranchisement to further decrease disparities in life expectancies.
