Gender Studies 241PH - Women and Gender in Science: 'Pharmocracy: Empire by Molecular Means'

Since the 1950s, the pharmaceutical industry -- one of the world's largest economic sectors and a core constituent of globalized corporate power -- has built a transnational empire that controls not only gender, sex, health, food chains, science, politics, stock markets, and private/public distinctions, but has completely changed what it means to be human or animal. We will study these transformations, and how pharmocracy produces knowledge through experimentation on impoverished humans and animals. In the context of the post-9/11 legal emergency frameworks, pharmocracy is also the nearly impenetrable tangle between pharma, academia, public health, and the military biosecurity bureaucracies.

4 credits in Gender Studies, Critical Social Thought, Critical Race and Political Economy, Anthropology, Sociology, History, Environmental Studies, Biology, or Geography.