Abigail Wilkerson

Here, Ann Cvetkovich, interviewed by Abby Wilkerson, brings Cvetkovich’s influential cultural studies analysis of depression explicitly into conversation with disability studies. Cvetkovich understands “feeling bad” as a defining affective state under neoliberalism. Drawing on a distinctive historical/cultural archive, she challenges the atomism of the neoliberal medical model that frames depression and affective distress more generally as the result of faulty brain chemistry—individual organisms gone awry. Instead, she traces these common experiences to sociopolitical phenomena ranging from current neoliberal demands for productivity as exemplified in university life, to histories of colonization, slavery, and displacement. The conversation considers the value of disability frameworks for understanding mental health diagnoses and the intersections of social institutions, bodily practices, and everyday affective life.

From the 1960s, when women began working together to end gender-based violence, to well into the twenty-first century, attitudes and practices have shifted in important ways, yet this social justice project is far from complete. While feminist resistance has gone public in unprecedented ways, institutional responses often lag far behind. This chapter focuses on medical contexts, arguing that gendered violencegendered violence, a neglected topic in bioethics, constitutes an important issue for the field, one urgently in need of intersectionalintersectional feminist bioethical analysis. Moreover, the chapter argues that this analysis requires intersectionalityintersectionality, such as including transgenderedtransgendered women and genderqueergenderqueer people in the focus, while addressing race, class, disability, and other vectors of oppression. Complex inegalitarian dynamics persist as pervasive factors in healthcare, compounding the harms of violence itself when treatment is sought. Mainstream medicine often treats the symptoms of violence while ignoring or obscuring the causes. However, a feminist analysis provides guidance based on the tenets and practices of movements against gendered violencegendered violence. Medical providers have a distinctive opportunity to intervene in the crisis of gendered violencegendered violence, and movement-based principles point the way to equitable and effective medical responses.

Writing is central both to the medical diagnostic codification of disability and to disabled people’s efforts to interrupt, complicate, or disrupt dominant medical narratives. This Symposium, like the George Washington University conference from which it takes its name, creates space for diverse modes and genres of claiming authority regarding diagnosis and its cultural and material effects. “Queer” and “crip” interrogations of diagnosis illuminate its status as a cultural phenomenon, embracing culturally disavowed embodiments and embodied experiences as tools for diagnosing inegalitarian social relations and opportunities for cultural interventions. This Symposium traces the workings of diagnostic normativity manifested in experiences such as “disruptive deafness,” unstable bodily materialities, pathologized grief and other forms of affective distress, and “surgical assemblages.” It presents a diverse array of compositions, articulated on each writer’s own terms, addressing a range of embodied experiences through multiple genres and voices, ranging from conversation transcript to scholarly essay, poetry, graphic memoir, and personal essay. Here, laypersons interrupt monologic medical diagnosis, claiming space to compose themselves. Together, the authors trace instances of corporeal “correction” back to the noxious agents, both environmental and political, that consistently breach the boundaries of corporeality.

Philosophers tend to construe the relation between justice and health in terms of the distribution of access to the existing health care system. However, significant patterns of injustice in the context of medicine, such as the function of health care as a form of social control, are overlooked in this approach. I employ perspectives of the AIDS and women's health movements to argue that the cultural authority of medicine must be morally evaluated, along with cultural aspects of oppression not fully captured by the distributive paradigm of justice. Medical discourse and practice contain implicit norms which stigmatize lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and heterosexual women. I examine ways in which the epistemic principle of objectivity, conceived as detachment, is central both to medical discourse and to mainstream concepts of justice; in both discourses this principle can be seen to produce distortions and to undermine the interests of oppressed groups. Important theories of access to health care fail to adequately address the needs of women and of gay and bisexual men, replicating some of the biases found in medical discourse. The standard distinction between naturally-based and socially-based goods obscures social influences on individual health, and presents culturally constituted differences between social groups as "facts of nature." Standard theories also emphasize procreation over nonreproductive sexuality. I conclude that justice in health requires much deeper changes than access to health care; and that bioethics must attend to social group difference as a central aspect of analysis.

The abstinence approach to sex education remains influential despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness. One bill forbids the “promotion” of “gateway sexual activity,” while requiring outright condemnation of “non-abstinence,” defined so loosely as to plausibly include handholding. Bioethics seldom (if ever) contributes to sex-ed debates, yet exploring the pivotal role of medical discourse reveals the need for bioethical intervention. Sex-ed debates revolve around a theory of human flourishing based on heteronormative temporality, a developmental teleology ensuring the transmission of various supposed social goods through heterosexual marriage (Halberstam, 2005). Heteronormative temporality also constitutes a moralized discourse in which the values of health and presumed certainties of medicine serve to justify conservative religious dictates that otherwise would appear controversial as the basis for public policy. Overall, this analysis explores how moralized medical discourses compound existing injustices, while suggesting bioethics’ potential contributions to moral and political analysis of sex-ed policies

This article explores how the notion of obesity as health problem (1) functions to obscure or justify global inequities related to food production and access and (2) indicates still deeper problems of injustice and the neglected role of embodiment in analyses of justice and injustice, and notions of political subjecthood. Food, the need to eat, and the food system shape social existence profoundly yet are underexplored in philosophy, especially political philosophy. Drawing on disability theory and food studies, this article uses the crisis of body weight to explore relationships between neoliberalism, transnational capitalism, the industrialized agro-food system, and world health. Obesity discourse spotlights lifestyle choices of individuals, casting women especially as making irresponsible decisions for their families. A politically informed (and more medically sophisticated) perspective suggests that the real crisis is a social pact, which I term the ThinContract, predicating personhood and full social inclusion on body type.