SPRING 2000
This information effective for Spring 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
This course provides a global introduction to the multi-cultural worlds of lesbian and gay life and institutions. Topics include: history, biography, and politics; lesbian, gay, and bisexual people of color; queer emergence, the transgender movement, creating new families, youth, law, repression, resistance, and the creation of new cultures. The course is open to and welcomes all students: homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual; women, men transgenders; and people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds.
Speakers, films, field trip to San Francisco.
Instructor: Nancy E. Stoller
Office: Coll 8-314
phone: 459-3104
nancys@cats.ucsc.edu
Office hours: Tues., 1-3; Thurs. 1-2; and by appt.
Sections: |
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01A: |
Monday |
2-3:10 p.m. |
Porter 241 |
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01B: |
Tuesday |
2-3:10 p.m. |
Porter 249 |
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01C: |
Wednesday |
3:30-4:40 p.m. |
Oakes 222 |
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01D: |
Thursday |
6:00-7:10 p.m. |
Porter 241 |
Community Studies 148 is designed for students interested in the social context of women's health. While all women share biological commonalties, our social positions, cultural backgrounds, occupations, and personal choices create unique situations. This course challenges purely biomedical definitions of women's health through a multi-cultural and feminist approach. Because half the world is women and we all have some relationship to health and illness, "Women's Health" constitutes a potentially enormous topic. Women's Health, the course, can only provide a partial approach to this topic.
To bring greater focus to our examination, the Spring 1999 course will examine women's health activism in a semi-historical manner, beginning with the emergence of the contemporary women's health movement of the 1970s and advancing to the present. We will include racial, class, and sexual critiques of the movement, as well as its major organizing themes: reproductive rights and technology, women's cancers, violence against women, cultural diversity, women's work and health, and the impacts of poverty and racism.
An important activity within the course will be education about and experimentation with various strategies of education and activism developed by various women's health movements: our bodies/ourselves consciousness raising groups, self-examination, confrontations, public education, demonstrations, rallies, lobbying, lawsuits, global activism.
A video series will include Rachel's Daughters, Cancer in Two Voices, The Confrontation, A Healthy Baby Girl, and Blind Eye to Justice. In some cases, videos will need to be viewed at the media center.
A special feature of the class will be a series of panel discussions where activists share their experiences. These panels will be open to the campus--you may invite your friends.
Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum, Cancer in Two Voices
Special issues of Journal of the American Medical Women's Association and Reproductive Health Matters
Sapphire, Push
The Boston Women's Health Book Collective's The New Our Bodies, Ourselves (1998 edition
Maria Elena Lucas, Forged Under the Sun
Amnesty International: Not Part of My Sentence: Human Rights of Confined Women in the U.S.
Course Reader
Evaluation will be based on:
A. Attendance and participation in section (25%). (NOTE: SECTION DISCUSSIONS ARE IMPORTANT. YOU MUST ATTEND A SECTION REGULARLY IN ORDER TO PASS THE COURSE.)
B. The following assignments (75%), ALL OF WHICH ARE TO BE SUBMITTED AT THE START OF LECTURE ON THE ASSIGNED DUE DATE
1. Health Journal, which will cover 3 weeks and include a short research attachment. Journals should discuss your own daily health as well as observations concerning women's/feminist health activism which you see or find yourself thinking of in conjunction with your daily life and the reading and speakers. The research attachment should be either copies of documents (newspaper articles; advertisements; flyers), information from the web, or annotated bibliography (2-3 items) which interested you during this period.(20%). Due April 22.
2. Class project(25%): You can do your project alone or with a partner or a group.
Options, ideas:
a. grant proposal--developed with a community or campus organization
(hours invested 15-20)
b. creative project--art, community, drama, dance, etc. The project
can be individual or collective (hours invested 15-20)
c. research paper--can be library research primarily or be an
original project (length 10-15 pp.)
All topics and projects must be approved. However, they are expected
to have an activist component, either in their documentation or their
expression.
Each project has two phases:
a. initial proposal. Due April 29
b. completed project/paper. Due June 3.
3. Take home exam (30%):
--reinterpret your health, health journal, and ideas about women's
health activism in light of the class reading, lectures, etc. Due at
9 a.m. 6/10, at Nancy Stoller's mailbox in College 8-214, the
official day of the exam for CMMU 148.
3/30--opening of course--Women's health in the fifties--access to abortion, birth control, childbirth, medical dominance; class and race
Film: "A healthy baby girl" (about DES daughters)
Details: pick your section
4/1-- the sixties--beginnings of the movement, birth control, the pill, DES and its long-term impact; examining the past from our present knowledge.
Reading: "Women's health movements in the U.S." in JAMWA. Winter, 1999; OBOS chs. 25 and 27 (on politics and women's health movements).
Begin your health journal; self-examination.
Other things to do this week or weekend:
Visit McHenry Library: Historical display of local women's health activism
4/6 The Boston Women's Health collective and OBOS; activism at the grass roots; self exam; self help; abortion rights; sterilization abuse
Reading: OBOS: "Preface" and "Introduction" (pps. 15-28); "Understanding our bodies: sexual anatomy, reproduction, and the menstrual cycle"(ch 12); "The Boston Women's Health Collective and Our Bodies, Ourselves," in JAMWA.
4/8 Seventies women's health activism in Santa Cruz
Guests: Deb Abbott, Kater Pollock, Val Loeffler (Santa Cruz Women's Health Collective founders), Kate Bowland (midwife arrested for practicing medicine without a license);
4/13 Women Against Rape: Confrontations and other extra-legal strategies
Guests: Jan Shirchild and Janet Gellman, founders of Santa Cruz Women Against Rape
Film: "The Confrontation" (made in Santa Cruz by a UCSC student--1983)
Reading: OBOS, ch.8.
4/15 When abortion was illegal.
Guests: Cynthia Mathews, Planned Parenthood of Santa Cruz; Carol Fuller, Reproductive Rights Network
Film: "From Danger to Dignity: the fight for safe abortion"
Reading: OBOS: chs. 13, 16, 17
Other things you could do this week:
4/14 Optional event: "Young women and the future of choice,"
4 p.m. Louden Nelson Community Center. Presentation of research results from national study about attitudes of women aged 16-25 about abortion. Also, a report on the development of pro-choice messages that connect with this age group. Open to the public, but please RSVP to Planned Parenthood, 425-1551 x29
4/16 McHenry Library: Internet workshop
4/20 Disability; age; sexualities; culture; effects of racism
(Outside of class viewing of "Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter")
Reading: "Lesbian health advocacy," "Disabled women's view of selective abortion" in JAMWA; "Relationships and sexuality" (section two) and ch. 23: Women growing older" in OBOS.
Assignment due: Health Journal
4/22 Panel: Cultural and economic strategies to secure Latina health Guests: Pat Zavella, others
Reading: Forged Under the Sun: Forjada bajo el sol, Maria Elena Lucas
Other things you could do this week:
4/23 Optional Friday event at Science Library:
4-5 p.m. Overview of sites on the internet for women's health information.
5-7 p.m. Library-sponsored reception with Santa Cruz women's health activists since the seventies
4/23 1-2 p.m at McHenry Library: Overview of sites on the internet for women's health information.
4/27-- The legacies of slavery and their impact on African-American women
Reading: Push, Sapphire; and "When sex workers run AIDS organizations," from Lessons from the Damned, in Reader.
4/29 African American women respond to health effects of racism
Guests: California Prostitute Education Project
Assignment due: project proposal
Other things you could do this week:
Evening talk: Jocelyn Elders, former US Surgeon General, speaking at UCSC
5/4-- Immigration, race, welfare wars, poverty, politics, and cultural diversity in recent California history
5/6--panel: Asian-Pacific Islander Health Issues
Reading: API selections in Reader: "The Health and Well-Being of Asian and Pacific Islander American Women by Asian and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health; "Health care decision making among Cambodian refugee women," "Mental health of southeast Asian refugee women: an overview," Managing chronic illness: An immigrant woman's acquisition and use of health care knowledge," "Do women really have more choices today?"
5/11--Activism and AIDS
5/13--Breast cancer activism
Guests: Breast Cancer Action; Sandra Butler, author
Films: Outside showing of "Rachel's Daughters," "Cancer in Two Voices"
Reading: Cancer in Two Voices; "The breast cancer movement," in JAMWA
5/18--Bodies: sexuality; reproductive updates; fetal surgery; Norplant, artificial insemination; surrogate motherhood
Reading: "Meeting the challenge of women's health at the NIH" and "Women's health movements in academic institutions," in JAMWA; OBOS, ch.18 (reproductive technology) and Section Four (childbearing)
5/20--Weight, body image, obesity, food
Guests: organized by UCSC Women's Center
Reading: OBOS, chs. 1-4
Some suggested readings on weight and body image:
-- Dawn Atkins, Looking Queer: Body Image & Identity in Lesbian,
Bisexual, Gay & Transgender Communities (Haworth)
-- Ophira Edut, Adios, Barbie: Young Women Write About Body Image,
Ethnicity Identity (Seal)
-- Becky Thompson, A Hunger So Wide & So Deep: American Women
Speak Out on Eating Problems (U of Minnesota)
Also good are:
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project (research and theory)
Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self (theory)
Susan Kano, Making Peace with Food (workbook)
Marcia Hutchinson, Transforming Body Image (workbook)
5/25--international organizing; the web; global issues in women's health
Reading: Reproductive Health Matters, Nov. 1997--entire; OBOS ch.26.
5/27: Violence and the state: women's health in prison
Guests: California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
Reading: Amnesty International Report on Human Rights of confined women in the US
Other things you could do this week: Evening event: Women Take Back The Night March, on campus
6/1--exchange day --no class
6/3--last day--presentations, evaluation, projects due
Assignment due: project
6/10 Assignment due: Final take home exam