Health Activism And Sexual Politics (feminist Engagements With Health, Illness And The Body)

Health Activism and Sexual Politics: Feminist Engagements with Health, Illness and the Body explores the intersection of health activism and sexual politics through both traditional research chapters and innovative contributions on creative and scholarly practice as activism.

Health Activism and Sexual Politics: Feminist Engagements with Health, Illness and the Body explores the intersection of health activism and sexual politics through both traditional research chapters and innovative contributions on creative and scholarly practice as activism.

The book showcases the analytical power of feminist research at the intersection of sexuality, health, and activism. As digital technologies create new possibilities and challenges for politics, sex, and health interventions, the contributors demonstrate diverse ways to engage meaningfully with activism. Spanning Latin America, Southern Africa, Northern Europe, the UK, and North America, the collection offers alternative epistemologies to hegemonic biomedical knowledge about illness, pleasure, pain, and marginalization. The interdisciplinary approach incorporates feminist technoscience studies alongside perspectives from the medical humanities, sexuality studies, gender studies, design studies, and drama studies. Each chapter challenges inequities and reimagines possibilities for health and well-being through collective action, creative engagement, and scholarly inquiry. Together, they insist on recognizing the multiplicity of experiences around illness and desire, making knowledge that values lived experiences as communicable, worthy of care, and deserving of recognition.

This book will appeal to scholars, students, activists, and artists interested in health, sexual practice, gender, activism, and public engagement.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part 1 Introduction 1. Engaging health activism, sexual politics and feminism Part 2 Health Activism and Public Mobilisation 2. The changing landscape of endometriosis activism in Finland: At the crossroads of personalization and digitalization of health 3. Risks, pleasures and desires: Attending to the sexual politics of gynaecological cancer patient activism 4. Abya Yala bleeds, exists and resists: Introducing the Latin American social movement for menstrual dignity Part 3 Creative Practice and the Arts as Health Activism 5. HYSTERECTOMY: BEDROCK – emplacing and making visible experiences of surgery for hysterectomy and surgical menopause through creative practice 6.Feminist performance-making: Radically kind theatre-making redressing the act of being vulnerabilised 7. Feminist activist strategies for designing sex technologies Part 4 Feminist Scholarship as Health Activism 8. Feminist prostate care? 9. Always already menstrual activist: Elaborations on being activist scholar 10. Feminist empiricism as feminist activism: Lessons from the GenderSci Lab

Lisa Lindén is an associate professor of gender and technology in the Division for Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Emily Jay Nicholls is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Health, University College London, UK.

Josefin Persdotter is an activist-scholar and sociologist, currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Division for Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.