AP/HREQ 3830 6.00
Women's Health and Equity
This course uses a critical human rights approach to examine the social determinants of health and intersectional identities in relation to women’s health. Medical practices, Canada’s health care system, and gender are examined. The course deals with reproductive health, mental health, body image, and other issues that impact women’s health in their everyday lives.
This course deals with these identities as it relates to health using an Intersectionality approach. Using a life cycle approach, we discuss how as women age, their health concerns evolve within a lack of support networks. The course includes an understanding of health professionals, the focus on disease and science, and illness as socially constructed in the context of the gendering of health and health care. We will explore women’s roles as mothers, patients, female health professionals, and the medicalization of gendered illness in terms of sexism and racism. Resistance and struggle as generic features of capital and will be examined in different contemporary contexts of identity and power as it relates to women’s health and equity. The course encourages students to challenge not only their own ideas about health and health care but also the ways in which ideas and institutions are socially constructed and perpetuated. The ways in which sociocultural forces play themselves out in different contexts relating to women’s health are still poorly understood and will be discussed in this course relating to the inequities of women in the health care system.
Prerequisite: 24 credits