Black Feminist Health Science Studies

Black and white picture of Fannie Lou Hammer on a yellow background with text that reads I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired

Black Feminist Health Science Studies (BFHSS) aims to highlight the necessity of incorporating social justice into medical science. It was created by interdisciplinary scholars who started their careers as undergraduates studying Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Black women have been one of the most ignored and marginalized groups in the history of social justice and healthcare. It is the hope that breaking down barriers that prevent health care access and equity for Black women will assist in the dismantling of barriers for other marginalized groups. The hope for this discipline is to be an inclusive one that addresses intersectional issues of race, gender and class. We also hope to demonstrate the necessity for understanding how societal factors prevent healthcare from being accessible as human right, not a privilege or commodity.

Early Images of Medical Education

Titled UNDER-CLASS EVOLUTION, the image is used to mark the apparent knowledge and sophistication gained from matriculating through the first year. The bottom left corner has an inset frame titled “Fresh.” The freshman is portrayed as slovenly with wild hair and poor posture while the sophomore, in contrast, is portrayed as clean-cut, mature, and dignified. The freshman has kinky black hair and a headband rag. He has tattered pants, no shoes or shirt, and is stooped over. He appears to have dirt smudges on his face. In contrast, the dominant image is that of regal sophomore. He is smoking a pipe and is wearing a suit and hat. He is standing on the steps of a building, with a pennant for his expected year of graduation. By using markers that signify Blackness as unkempt and unclean, the students mark for each other the transformation that occurs in their education over the course of one year. A lowly freshman has evolved into a presentable and respectable sophomore, a transformation so significant that Black becomes white, expressing the significance of first year education as well as the prescience of racial markers in the minds of Emory medical students.

My dissertation, Race, Region, and Gender in Early Emory School of Medicine Yearbooks, examines how patient and student bodies are represented in the yearbooks students create during their training. By analyzing the sociocultural aspects of medical education at Emory School of Medicine after the release of the influential Flexner Report, I build a foundation for understanding how representations shape medical students understandings of potential patients and themselves. The hidden curriculum of medical education is communicated, not in classroom lecture, but in the ways that institutional culture promulgates certain representations over others. An idyllic student and patient emerge that reinforce one another at the expense of bodily diversity among patients and students, exacerbating care disparities through controlling vernacular medical media. I identified medical school yearbooks from 1913-1917, the period immediately following the implementation of Abraham Flexner’s recommendations for medical schools in Georgia, and looked for images and language that spoke to the way women, people of color, Black people, and particularly Black women were represented. The stark contrast between the depictions of these marginalized groups and the students creating the images is an important site of inquiry in this dissertation.

The Obsidian Project

Dark skinned black girl in front of Ad for the Boondocks TV show with Huey's Eye in the frame. — The Obsidian Project

I want a feminism that doesn’t tokenize or fetishize the marginalized folks within the movement, i.e. people of color, queer folks, people with disabilities, etc. To this end, I am really interested in the margins within the margins and how people with intersecting marginal identities create the world they want to see and resist others’ attempts to use their representations for their own purposes. How do we see ourselves? The Obsidian Project focuses dark skinned queers of color, seeing them/us in new light and listening with intention. By promoting the physical visibility of dark skinned queer folks of color I hope to counter dominating representations that only invoke black skin as a sexualized other. With detailed verbal description of the images, I intend to craft a new narrative based in people’s own realities. In talking with my subjects, I am learning a lot about what it means to be a dark skinned person in a world where colorism is still a difficult conversation, even among folks with a queer politic. This is a project about deepening our understanding of how internalized oppressions are operationalized in activist communities and healing these unspoken wounds.

Quirky Black Girls

Quirky Black Girls is the tangible manifestation of the spirit of a small group of students that nurtured me while I attended Spelman College. These girls dared to follow their own path and chart their own course in a conservative and sometimes hostile environment. This looked like piercings, tattoos, fishnets, and high platform heels. It sounded like Q’uranic Prayer, soul stirring poetry, and southern crunk music sung with an operatic cadance. And since then, I keep meeting black girls who did their own thing who looked, talked, walked, lived in ways that weren’t refected anywhere. In 2008 I met fellow QBG kindred Alexis Pauline Gumbs and when our powers combined, Quirky Black Girls was born! As co-conspirators of the Quirky BlackGirl Movement, we began to pull ourselves towards each other. Via a blog, a social network, a facebook group, regular arcade nights, jam sessions, cookOUTS, a Black speculative fiction reading group and more, QBG, allows a diverse group of self identified Quirky Black Girls to build bravery and challenge each other’s thinking. QBG facilitates mutually nurturing online and in-person spaces for Black feminist conversations, which honors and supplements the rich tapestry of Black feminism that has come before us.

SJSci

Dr. Deboleena Roy and graduate students’ web based collection that examines issues in science, race, disability, reproductive justice, technology, the environment, gender, and class.

#TransformDH

Transformative Digital Humanities: Doing Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, and Class in DH

#HashtagActivism

The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags, including #JusticeForTrayvon, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people. They show how marginalized groups, long excluded from elite media spaces, have used Twitter hashtags to advance counternarratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent.

Projects