Heather Glenny

This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science. (Theory)

This course examines the relationship between incarceration and medical experimentation in America, exploring how carceral spaces—prisons, asylums, detention centers, plantations—have been made into medical laboratories. Students will think about physical modes of confinement as well as symbolic and systemic strategies that have been used to enlist minoritarian and disenfranchised bodies in the production of medical knowledge. Readings will focus on literary fiction (novels, short stories, comics) and critical theory (critical race studies, disability studies) centering issues of bodily autonomy, informed consent, and racialization in the prison and the laboratory.