This course draws on feminist and post-structuralist accounts of the body to investigate the influence of gender and other forms of difference on understandings of health and illness. It will consist of theoretical explorations of the body as a cultural, material and political object, combined with contemporary case studies including pregnancy and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and depression. The debate between feminist (and other critical discourses) and biomedicine regarding concepts of embodiment, health and illness will form a central problematic. Another important focus will be issues of representation, which are central to the cultural politics of health and illness: how do scientific, critical and popular discourses represent the disordered body and what effects do these representations have? The final section of the course will examine autobiographical accounts of illness and images that challenge dominant accounts of health and disease.

3,000 - 4,000 words of written work and tutorial participation (100%).

Normally offered in alternate years
10 x 1.5 hour lectures, 3 x 2 hour lecture/activity sessions and 12 x 1 hour tutorials
Lectures will be taped.

At least one of GEND1001, GEND1002, ENGL1011 or permission of the lecturer.

* Shildrick Margrit with Janet Price (1999) 'Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction' in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader.
* Bordo, Susan (1993) ‘Whose Body is This? Feminism, Medicine and the Conceptualization of Eating Disorders in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body.