Bioethicist And Historian Alice Dreger To Lecture At Muhlenberg College
Alice Dreger, an historian and bioethicist whose observations center broadly on the relationships between science, medicine and identity, will lecture at Muhlenberg College.Thursday, October 27, 2005 01:59 PM
The lecture isa part of the series, The Ethics and Politics of Identity. Dreger’s talk, “ Conjoined Twins, Intersex, and the Future of Normal,” will be held on November 8 at 7 p.m. in Moyer Hall, Miller Forum. A reception will follow the lecture. This event is free and open to the public.
Through her work, Dreger has examined the historical approaches to the treatment of people born with “abnormal” bodies, including reproductive anatomies ( Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex) and conjoined twins ( One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal). The larger goal of Dreger’s work has been to critically examine the socio-political structures of power that define normality and abnormality within the clinic. Dreger’s scholarship has also helped to catalyze activism within the intersexed community; she currently serves as the Director of Medical Education for the Intersex Society of North America
Clinical science has worked incessantly to catalogue bodily deviations from the normal state. In “ Conjoined Twins, Intersex, and the Future of Normal,” Dreger will ask provocative questions about these classifications and the ways in which abnormality is defined by the clinic. Western medicine has been largely invested in defining bodily otherness and has co-created a large and successful economy driven by the sale of “normalizing” goods.
These structures are often resisted by (and are thus threatened by) those who would base their identity on disease and/or abnormality. Dreger will examine the ethics of identity as it relates to normality/ freakishness, but with a special attention to medically-defined otherness and the social function of the clinic.
The Ethics and Politics of Identity is a year long series of programs, sponsored by the Muhlenberg College Center for Ethics , about the ethical challenges that surround the changing categories of social, national, and global identities.
