Join us for a talk and discussion with Nessette Falu, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, on her book Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil (Duke 2023).
About the book
In Unseen Flesh, Dr. Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.
This STS (Science and Technology Studies) Book Talk is organized by Dr. Liliana Gil as part of the Comparative Studies Seminar in Technology and Culture and is open to the entire Ohio State community. To receive the Zoom link, please pre-register with your Ohio State credentials. Participants may opt for joining in person at Hagerty Hall 451.
This event is supported by the Center for Latin American Studies, the Feminist Science and Technology Studies & Social Justice Working Group at the Humanities Institute, and the Department of Comparative Studies.
This event was supported in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Title VI NRC funding. The content of this event does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.
