Courses That Matter: Material Embodiment and Meaning Making in Undergraduate Women?s Health Education in the United States, 1970-2024

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on undergraduate women's health education in the U.S. over the past 50 years, with particular attention paid to ways in which undergraduate women's health education has discursively engaged with fat embodiment and various competing constructs of “health” itself. This dissertation argues that undergraduate women's health education has compromised its ability to live up to its founding raison d’être by allowing for an imperative of “health promotion” to take precedence—pedagogically and curricularly—over collective, embodied subjectivity and processes of anti-oppressive knowledge building. This project understands an imperative of health promotion as being necessarily shaped by ideologies of the “normal” that have been incubated in dominant cultures of white supremacy, ableism, imperialism, cis- and heteronormativity, compulsory thinness, and capitalist exploitation. This dissertation is not a critique from outside of undergraduate women's health education, looking in to chastise, but rather strives to be a reflexive account from within, attending to ways in which we as undergraduate women's health education participants—which I’ve been as a student, a guest lecturer, a curriculum designer, an author, and an instructor—have perpetuated harms counterproductive to our stated pedagogical and political aims. This project explores how those of us engaged in feminist health knowledge cultures (including within undergraduate women's health education) might more effectively attend to those harms and we might work to create the conditions of possibility for repair. Chapter 1 is an extended introduction contextualizing this interdisciplinary project in women’s and gender studies, fat studies, and disability studies scholarship. Chapter 2 describes the mixed-methods approach used in this project, which engages semi-structured autoethnographic interviews and textual analysis of undergraduate women's health syllabi from the last 50 years, along with an archive of published writing by past and current instructors of post-secondary women's health education. Chapter 3 offers a genealogy of the 20th century women’s health movement in the United States from an intersectional and disability studies perspective; this perspective emphasizes the effects of ideologies of “positive eugenics” in the U.S. on the “birth moment” of the women’s health movement in the late 1960s. Chapter 4 offers a genealogy of undergraduate women's health education in the U.S., surfacing and highlighting common practices and pedagogical protocols and their broader implications for feminist knowledge- and community-building. Chapter 5 gives an account of fat embodiment as a perennial and contested topic in undergraduate women's health education in the U.S. over the past 50 years. Finally, Chapter 6 explores how two competing ideological/pedagogical approaches to fat embodiment have manifested in texts used in undergraduate women's health education, illustrating and articulating the stakes and implications of each in terms of health promotion and anti-oppressive knowledge building.