welcome to "the healthy woman: mothers to cyborgs"
WHAT IS THIS CLASS ABOUT?
Honors 1010B, "The Healthy Woman: Mothers to Cyborgs," is a medical humanities course offered at Nova Southeastern University that focuses on the question, "What defines a healthy woman?" The goal of any humanities course is to look at what it means to be human, what are our experiences and how do people express these experiences. A medical humanities course looks at these questions in the context of medicine, asking for instance how illnesses shape identity and how cultural biases shape the direction of medicine. In short, the field examines the reciprocal relationship between medicine and culture. A medical humanities course that focuses on women, then, will look at questions like those above in the context of gender issues. Thus, we might ask, what are the myths, attitudes, and beliefs that surround conceptions of women’s health. In this class, we have anchored our studies in one basic question: What defines a healthy woman? Since the Enlightenment and its rapid developments in medicine, the conception of Woman has been in flux. What is “natural”? What is “normal”? What is a woman’s cultural responsibilities and how does her body shape those expectations? Over time, women have been viewed as biologically determined to be wives, mothers, and nurturers, essential to the functions of society, but they have also been regarded as potential contaminants, agents of moral degeneracy, madness, and criminality. And it all comes back to women’s health. So, in this class, we examine a variety of texts: novels, essays, paintings, and blogs from philosophers, poets, cultural critics, and artists in order to answer the basic question: What defines a healthy woman? This class is an opportunity to bring our passions together. It is an interdisciplinary course—not just science and not just art. Instead, we are looking at the science and art of being woman. Everyone is invited to peruse our site. The issues of women’s health impact everyone. |
WHAT IS THIS SITE ABOUT?
As one of our final projects in this class, students were asked to compose creative artifacts that ...
* Hypertexts — Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) is said to be one of the earliest hypertexts. In part, his purpose was to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, by making readers see themselves in the text and thus the text seem a part of reality. This is a good place to start when learning about hypertexts. Hypertexts have the ability to facilitate postmodern discourses by challenging boundaries.
Hypertexts are often described as labyrinthine. This is because they are interconnected, like a web—open, potentially boundless, with no formal entrances or exits. As such, unlike a traditional narrative, there is no privileged plot with a beginning, middle, and end; no main character or finite selection of protagonists; nor even any limitations on the themes. The hypertext, then, is not properly a product that readers ‘read’ but rather an interactive experience that readers help to create. Therefore, interpretations of hypertexts can be multiplicitous, contradictory, and disorienting, like the pathways of a labyrinth. Examples of hypertexts include the Choose Your Own Adventure books and Wikipedia. The advantage of a hypertext is that it redefines the power dynamics of readers and authors. A decentralized text, like a hypertext, disempowers authors since they no longer have sole power over the text and its meaning. Still, we cannot simply say hypertexts empower readers either since every reader’s interpretation and contribution may be influenced by other readers interacting with the text. A text that both empowers and disempowers individuals, then, is more about the empowerment of a collective or cultural identity than it is about the empowerment of a single entity. In this way, a hypertext has the potential to capture the noise, plurality, and fragmented experiences of a people. This is why the class project, “What does it mean to be Woman?”, has taken the form of a hypertext. |