One or more presenters to be selected from Call for Papers.
What defines one’s race, gender, and sex is increasingly in flux. These legally and socially constructed categories are on the one hand critiqued for their fallibility and tendency toward stereotype. On the other hand, increasingly claims that these categories are fixed or provable by science have caught the attention of business, researchers and the federal government.
For example, recently, industries have taken to intersecting race and science in a manner that industry leaders claim will benefit Blacks, Latinos, and certain Jewish populations. These companies bring to market and advertise race-based or race-associated “medicines” to ethnic minority populations. Indeed, companies patent race-based drugs and market those products directly to minority groups. The Food and Drug Administration supports these efforts and this gives legal force and medical legitimacy to the medications targeted at ethnic populations and the companies that produce them.
But, race is not the only category in which “science” has something to say about social and legal categories. Recent efforts to find the gay gene, or the sex chromosomes in athletes, or the violent gene among black youth reveal the complicated and highly political nature of determining race, sex, and gender. We consider who benefits from and who is harmed by these new biopolitics.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.