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News and Views
Spring 2002 Volume 12, issue 2
Gender, Science, and Medicine
by Stacey Langwick
Science and medicine capture our imagination. In today's world, we often turn to science to figure out how to transform undesirable states into more pleasurable ones. Our scientific understanding of diseases and our use of modern medicines influences the ways we think about and act on our bodies as well as our world. Historically, the knowing and transforming of bodies - what we tend to call assessments of "health" and acts of healing - shaped how genders are defined, distinguished and enacted. As a result, when science and medicine establish a ground for international interactions and motivate alliances that produce powerful networks of resources, they also engender these interactions in specific ways.
I
joined the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research this January
through a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology. Trained
as a medical anthropologist and holding a Master's in public health, I
will be teaching courses at the University of Florida addressing gender
issues in science, medicine, and technology.
As women's bodies are increasingly appropriated, read, and medicalized through institutionalized efforts to promote wellness and to decrease disease and disorder, students are drawn to studies of health and healing in larger numbers. This semester, I am teaching Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Women and a graduate anthropology seminar titled Women and Health: An Exploration of Gender, Knowledge, and Power. In the fall, I will be teaching an undergraduate class exploring feminist theories of science as well as a graduate seminar in anthropology that will examine ethnographies of science. In the future, I have plans to teach classes concerning the gendering of bodies and body politics, feminist perspectives of colonialism and post-coloniality, and critical approaches of international development, particularly concerning Africa. In addition, I am in the process of designing a summer study abroad course in Uganda for 2003 for the Center.
My own research focuses on issues of healing and women's health in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Tanzania. Broadly speaking, I am interested in exploring competing forms of medical knowledge and how their production and relationships reveal certain forms of gender play. In such work the making of specific genders are intimately tied to questions of materiality, science, and politics. My current research and writing addresses moments of cultural and scientific translation that occur during encounters between biomedical and indigenous medical systems. In an ethnographic study of healing practices in southeastern Tanzania, I am currently exploring the making of women's bodies through traditional and biomedical practices dedicated to maternal and infant care. Therapeutic practices - both those considered scientific and those that are not - embody subjects and objects of medical interventions. This current work illustrates how bodies familiar to and knowable within biomedicine have become critical to national and international efforts to professionalize the practice of "traditional medicine."
Dr. Stacey Langwick is an assistant professor at UF and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology and the CWSGR
The 3rd Annual Girl Scout Art Exhibit
March
2002 marked the third year that the Girl Scouts of Alaco Plus contributed
artwork for Women’s History Month. The artwork on display captures
the spirit of UF’s Women’s History Month: We’re Out to
Make a World of Difference. The artwork is on display from February 24
through March 30 in the hallways of the second floor in the Reitz Union.
Contributors from the various Girl Scout troops in Alachua County were
recognized at a reception on March 2, 2002. All participants received
certificates in recognition of their contributions to the legacy of Women’s
History Month. Some of the media used by the Girl Scouts included mobiles,
collages, and 3D designs.
