Feminist Perspectives on Body, Disability, and Health
A Penn State Graduates in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Conference
Program and Schedule
- Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, Penn State, State College, PA 16802
- Tuesday, March 4 and Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Our current moment serves as an exigence for this conference theme, in a cultural atmosphere of pandemic(s), coerced medical assistance in dying, insufficient and dwindling access to social security and health insurance, the devaluing and abandonment of disabled lives, historical legacy of eugenics, ongoing threats to bodily autonomy, and increasing pressures of neoliberalism. Our conference theme considers whose bodies, abilities, and health are granted protection or treated as fungible. We bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are eager to explore the intersections of embodiment and corporeality; health, illness, and wellness; and broad perspectives and frameworks on disability within feminist, queer, and trans studies.
Sawyer Seminar Keynote Speaker
- Tuesday, March 4
- 9:30 a.m.
- V. Jo Hsu, University of Texas at Austin
“Diagnosis by Exclusion and the Stories that Make Us Sick”
This talk considers the role of narrative in assigning disease—literal and imagined—to particular bodyminds. Blending story and critical analysis, Jo explores how medical research conceals old prejudices in the guise of scientific progress. The presentation journeys through a history that connects the pathologization of trans identities with the white supremacist roots of hysteria and the model minority myth in medical racism. What results is an insistence on our interconnected pasts and interdependent futures—and on the role that storytelling must play in approaches to healing.
Keynote Speaker
- Wednesday, March 5
- 11:00 a.m.
- Andrea Miller, Penn State
“On Being Sick and Sad in Feminist Science and Technology Studies”
This talk takes an autoethnographic approach to consider what it means to do Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) when working through, around, and with conditions of grief, chronic illness, and disability. Specifically, I focus on forms of STS that emerge at the intersections of philosophy of science and decolonial anthropology. Despite critical shifts in how scholars think and do ethnography, particularly given its historically colonialist underpinnings, I consider what it means for STS to account for the ableist norms that nonetheless attend doing ethnography with rigor and reflect on what it might mean to do STS otherwise.
Past Conferences
2025 Conference – Feminist Perspectives on Body, Disability and Health
2023 Conference – Breaking Barriers: Agents of Change
2022 Conference – [Re]Emergence: [Re]imagination, [Re]vision, and Revolution
2021 Conference – Disruptions and Eruptions
2018 Conference – Trans-Feminisms
2017 Conference – Feminism, Race, & the Anthropocene
2014 Conference – The Future of Women’s Studies and Women’s Studies of the Future
2013 Conference – Speaking Up: A Feminist Practice
2011 Conference – Inviting Intersection: Interdisciplinary Dialogues of Feminism & Feminist Concerns