ONLINE EVENT

Please join us next week, Monday March 15 @ 12:30pm for the start of the Medicine, Health, and Representation Speaker Series. Dr. Bettina Judd, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington will be giving a poetry reading from her book, Patient., which draws on historical evidence of 19th-century medical experimentation on Black women, scholarly explorations of the body and the archive, and personal medical history. We hope you will join us for this poetic exploration of issues related to race, gender, and science. Please feel free to distribute widely and encourage your students to attend. Full schedule and flyer below. Please register via Zoom to receive meeting links. 

Medicine, Health, and Representation Speaker Series - Spring 2021 Schedule

Monday, March 15, 2021, 12:30-1:30 PM PST [ZOOM LINK to register]
“Poems from Patient.”
Dr. Bettina Judd
Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, University of Washington

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art literature and music to develop feminist thought. Judd will be reading selections from her poetry collection, Patient.:

“...Patient., is about recovery in many senses: recovery of the subjectivity of several historical figures, through the recovery, reconstitution, and telling of their stories—among them Anarcha Wescott, Betsey Harris, Lucy Zimmerman, Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, who were infamously “patients” or subjects of inspection and “plunder” by, among others, J. Marion Sims, the controversial gynecologist, and P.T. Barnum, showman and circus founder. Sims (and the speculum) and Barnum are the featured antagonists in many of these flawlessly empathetic poems, but an unnamed speaker who adds a contemporary voice to the lyric chorus implicates those in charge of her care during a present-day hospital stay at a teaching hospital—suggesting the linkage of modern medical treatment to the traumas vulnerable Black women, enslaved and not, suffered at the hands of unethical scientists and physicians in earlier eras. In the collection’s opening poem, the speaker reckons, “…verdicts come in a bloodline” and she determines “to recover” from “an ordeal with medicine” by “learn[ing] why ghosts come to me.”  She ends her testimony by asking, “Why am I patient?”  (Read that line in however many nuanced ways you want.)  In this profoundly layered witnessing, the subject might be “in the dark ghetto of my body,” or “an idea of metaphors that live where bodies cannot.”  Yet even as Judd vividly evokes the precise brutalities visited upon the Black female body and psyche—letting us see and hear women who “quieted/ broke into many pieces”—these poems also speak of “shedding something, ” “another kind of sloughing.” Ultimately, Patient. enacts a healing and move toward wholeness, recovery of, as one speaker puts it, “spirit [t