Emily Lim Rogers ’15
Influenced by Michel Foucault and poststructuralism, queer and feminist theory helps us think through the social construction of knowledge, naming, and identities. Meanwhile, feminist and queer political projects have had a historically complicated relationship with “medicalization,” or the process by which phenomena become understood as problems to be known by medicine and treated by medical intervention. The medicalization of women’s bodies and the pathologization of homosexuality and transgender, for instance, raise the political stakes of what is, and is not, conferred in the status of a diagnosis.
This talk applies queer and feminist approaches to the contemporary debate over chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a contested diagnosis that is found disproportionately in women. Rather than understand the debate between CFS patient activists and researchers as one of “pro” versus “anti-science,” Rogers will attempt to unravel the constellation of gender formations, economic relations, labor arrangements, and racialized bodies that make it so difficult to distinguish normal fatigue from abnormal fatigue at the present juncture.
Emily Lim Rogers ’15 is a second year PhD student in American Studies at NYU. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she concentrated in LGBT studies, US cultural history, and sociology. Her work draws on STS, medical anthropology, disability studies, feminist/queer theory, and the history of capitalism. Currently, she is working a project that examines the historical, cultural, and economic forces that shape the controversy over chronic fatigue syndrome (myalgic encephalomyelitis).