Research
Areas of research
biomedicine and culture, science and technology studies (STS),
feminist science studies, feminist theory, theories of race,
history and social studies of medicine,
pharmaceuticals, heart disease, race and gender
Book project
Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference is a book manuscript forthcoming from Duke University Press. It traces discourses of race, heart disease, and pharmaceuticals in the US since the founding of American cardiology. Medicating Race illustrates that in heart disease research and practice, American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of identity and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life. Race in heart disease research and practice is durable: it cannot easily be gotten rid of. It is also a preoccupation: it cannot easily be let go. Race in medicine provokes appeal and aversion, disassociation and solidarity, displacement and investment. Arguments over how to medicate race reveal fundamental tensions in democratic and unequal American medicine and society. Close attention to this particular story has implications for global scholarly and activist conversations about pharmaceuticals, race, and justice.
In 2005, BiDil became the first drug ever approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in a specific race: it was indicated for “heart failure in self-identified black patients.” As such, it became fodder for both popular and academic debate about the role of race in medicine, and the nature of racial difference more broadly. As novel as its FDA indication was, this drug represents just one moment in a longstanding and dynamic interplay of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in America. Medicating Race examines these: from racialized understandings of coronary disease as a “disease of modernity” in early cardiology, to the constructions of normal populations in epidemiological research in and since the Framingham Heart Study, to the constitution of and contestation over African American hypertension as a disease category, to debates over thiazide diuretics. Racial preoccupations were present at the founding of cardiology and have both endured and transformed since then. Paying attention to the roles that social-justice oriented practitioners have played allows us to see that the durability of racialized disease categories – and the appeal of racialized drugs – does not rest on genetic determinism, and Medicating Race argues that medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation.
Ongoing projects
Pharmaceutical industry amid economic crisis and the pharmaceuticalization of philanthropy: Part of this project involves tracking transformations in Big Pharma as it faces challenges to the blockbuster model and as philanthropists are increasingly involved in historically neglected diseases. An article from this material was recently published in BioSocieties. Another part of this project considers pharmaceutical efforts outside of Big Pharma and traditional biotech. This involved fieldwork at a small pharmaceutical company in South Africa in May-June 2010, and further research will be pursued in fall 2011.
Health disparities and American citizenship claims: This project analyzes particular extraordinary events — including the deaths of the postal workers in the anthrax attacks of 2001, and the 2011 release of the Scott sisters from a Mississippi prison conditional upon the donation of a kidney from one sister to the other — to situate an argument for the centrality of racism in the constitution of American biological citizenship.
Feminist theory and heart disease: An article about Betty Friedan and heart disease has recently been published in Body & Society, and new work is considering how the hydraulic, mechanical, and electrical aspects of the heart can contribute to feminist articulations of the body.
