University of Minnesota 'Bodies that Matter: Feminist Approaches to Disability Studies' course claims 'oppression' by the 'ideologies of ableism’
The U of Minnesota GWSS (Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies) Department includes a course entitled "Bodies that Matter: Feminist Approaches to Disability Studies.”
The U of Minnesota GWSS (Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies) Department includes a course entitled “Bodies that Matter: Feminist Approaches to Disability Studies.”
The course description defines “dis/ability” not as “a physical or mental defect” but as a “form of social meaning mapped to certain bodies in larger systems of power and privilege.”
The description also claims that “health care” was “differentially distributed or limited” for some groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, and compares this idea to the way “systems of social and economic power determine the life chances of those who claim, or are claimed by disability.”
The 3-credit course will reveal how “people with disabilities have developed many daily life strategies that can be models for everyone coping with the pandemic.”
In the class, “feminist approaches” will be utilized to “explore dis/ability as a vector of oppression” due to “race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.”
The course description attributes “such oppression” to the “ideologies of ableism”.
The University of Minnesota GWSS focuses on “social change” and challenging “structural inequalities” in their Undergraduate and Graduate programs.
Another similar undergraduate course within the GWSS Department is “Sex, Love, and Disability.”
The course description states that “people with disabilities are figured either as childlike and asexual, or improperly hypersexual,” which they claim “has meant denial of sexual agency and gender expression”. The class will address questions such as, “What might it mean to desire disability?,” “Is there a disability sexual culture?”, and “Do disabled people queer sex, or does sexuality queer disability?”
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Graduate degree programs center around themes such as “critical race and transnational feminisms”, and “critical gender and sexualities, trans*, and queer studies.”
The U of Minnesota’s Department of Gender, Womens, and Sexuality Studies states that it “promotes feminist scholarship”, “employs decolonizing and feminist pedagogies”, and addresses “systemic inequities and oppressions” as they relate to “gender and sexuality” as well as “race, nation, caste, and disability.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of Minnesota for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
