American Experience presents a virtual PAST FORWARD conversation exploring the ways narratives and biases surrounding women’s bodies determine and limit our understanding of them. This conversation is inspired in part by our new streaming film The Cancer Detectives.
Panelists will address the ways in which women’s healthcare outcomes can be shaped by existing narratives focused on women’s bodies. They will analyze the emotions of shame and concealment that have shrouded the female form, discussing how these perceptions can be informed by the race and class of the women involved. The panelists will also examine how stigma, ignorance, and bias can either prevent women from seeking proper care or keep them from receiving it if they do.
Panelists:
Ameenah Shakir, Ph.D. is a 20th Century U.S. historian of race and medicine at the University of Houston. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and explores the intersection of race, medicine, and gender. She is currently working on a book titled Birthing Liberation, a biography of Dr. Helen O. Dickens, a Black physician activist who worked to desegregate medical education, developed cancer prevention programs, and fostered diasporic connections with women physicians and Black club women during the post-World War II era.
Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University, where she studied narrative and cognition. Her first book, Eve: How the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution, is a New York Times bestseller, a Foyles 2023 Nonfiction Book of the Year, a finalist for the Women’s Prize, and the source of most of the inappropriate dinner party conversations you might have had over the holidays. Her essays and poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Scientific American, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Poets Against the War.
This conversation will be moderated by Pam Belluck. Pam is a New York Times staff writer whose honors include a Pulitzer Prize and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. She writes about a range of health and medical subjects and her work has been chosen for The Best American Science Writing. Her book, “Island Practice,” about an eccentric doctor on an island, is in development for a TV series.
Photo credit for event art: The University of Pennsylvania.
