Body/Bodies Series Lecture: “The New Biopolitics of Race, Gender, and Reproductive Bodies” by Dorothy Roberts

• Event Date: Thursday, November 7, 2013
• Time: 4:30 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

This lecture explores the convergence of expanding reproductive technologies that incorporate advances in genetic science and a new biopolitics that relies on re-inventing race in biological terms using cutting-edge genetic science and biotechnologies. Women are increasingly expected to use genetic screening to guarantee good health in their children. At the same time, companies that market race-based biotechnologies now promise to extend the benefits of genetic research to people of color in the form of race-specific pharmaceuticals and gene-based testing services. What are the implications of including women of color in the market for reproductive technologies and in the expectation that women will use them to manage genetic risk? Roberts critically explores the role of race and racism in new ways of governing reproductive bodies in the genomic age.

Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011. Among her many public interest positions, Roberts is the chair of the Board of Directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

The Body/Bodies Series is co-organized and -sponsored by IPRH and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, with co-sponsorship by the Spurlock Museum.