Premature Death
On Race, Survival, and the Limits of Technology
Monica Casper
Department of Gender & Women’s Studies
The University of Arizona
This talk draws from Dr. Casper’s bookin-progress, Abbreviated Lives: Race,
Survival, and the Quiet Politics of
Infant Mortality, to explore premature,
preventable death. Looking both at
i n fa n t m o r t a l i t y a n d h o s p i t a l
infections, the talk situates premature
death in the context both of the U.S.
health care system touted as “the best
in the world” as well as systems of
structural violence including race,
gender, poverty, and other types of
social and corporeal vulnerability.
Inspired by Foucault, among others, Dr.
Casper asks: Who lives? Who dies? Who
is allowed to live, and who is sacrificed
so that others may thrive?
Monica J. Casper is Department Head and Professor of Gender
and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Africana Studies and
the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. She
researches and writes about gender, race, health, bodies, sexuality,
motherhood, reproductive politics, trauma, and disability. She is
author of the award-winning book The Making of the Unborn
Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery: Co-Author (with Lisa
Jean Moore) of Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility and The
Body: Social and Cultural Dissections; Editor of Synthetic Planet:
Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Life; and co-editor (with
Paisley Currah) of Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies
and Knowledge.
Monica is a managing editor of The Feminist Wire, co-editor and
publisher of TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, and co-editor of the NYU
book series Biopolitics. A prolific creative writer and public
intellectual, Monica’s essays and stories have appeared in Mojave
River Review, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, The Feminist Wire, Slow
Trains Literary Journal, Florida Review, Canyon Voices, American
Sexuality Magazine, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Spilling Ink
Review, The Linnet’s Wings, Vine Leaves, Conscience, and elsewhere.
Thursday, April 23
4:00pm
Williams 134
26th Annual Mullins Lecture
Questions? prolson@vt.edu
STS@VT