[Sci-tech-public] Talk by Anne Pollock on May 10; Schedule of Events: May 4-29, 2006

[Debbie Meinbresse]

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!

I would also like to call your attention to an upcoming talk by Anne Pollock:

Wednesday -  May 10th
2:30 pm
14E-304

"Retrofitting Women's Heart Health:
A Meditation on the Occasion on the Death of Betty Friedan"

A talk by and discussion with Anne Pollock,
STS graduate student and Women's Studies community member.

RSVP to womens-studies at mit.edu.
Tea and Sweets will be served.
Hosted by the MIT Program in Women's Studies.

Paper Description
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.


Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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