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<b>A Schedule of Events is attached for the period May 4-29.
It's hard to believe the academic year is coming to a close. Please
mark these events on your calendar and plan to attend!
<br><br>
I would also like to call your attention to an upcoming talk by Anne
Pollock:<br><br>
Wednesday - May 10th<br>
2:30 pm <br>
14E-304<br>
<br>
<font color="#0000FF">"Retrofitting Women's Heart Health: <br>
A Meditation on the Occasion on the Death of Betty Friedan"<br>
</font> <br>
A talk by and discussion with Anne Pollock,<br>
STS graduate student and Women's Studies community member.<br><br>
</b>RSVP to womens-studies@mit.edu.<br>
Tea and Sweets will be served.<br>
Hosted by the MIT Program in Women's Studies.<br>
<br>
Paper Description<br>
When Betty Friedan died in February, we had occasion to remember her role
in the women's movement--especially her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique,
which was widely credited with igniting feminism's Second Wave. In the
obituaries, one line in otherwise sweeping narratives fell flat.
"The cause of death was heart failure." Because in my own
work I am interested in the history and social studies of heart disease
and identity in America, I became intrigued. Why is it that the number
one cause of death of American women does not sound like it belongs in a
narration of a feminist life? There are emerging stories of women's heart
disease, that have resonances with contemporary feminist critiques of
medicine: women not being listened to by their doctors, diagnostic tests
designed on male models, and, in a way that is simultaneously
technological and poetic, of women's hearts as more difficult to read
than men's, this time with angiography. But I am also interested in
opening up alternative feminist narrations. Following the tactic of
theorists such as Foucault and Deleuze, who argue that the solutions to
today's problems cannot come from today's modes of questioning or
answering them because of our immersion in contemporary cliche, I am also
testing the creative potential of looking for a feminist narrative in the
past/elsewhere. I am reading Betty Friedan as an unexpectedly evocative
theorist of medical anthropology, using her writings on heart disease in
particular as well as her theory to pose problems in women's health today
in a way that is both retro and nouveau.<br><br>
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Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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