Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization

In this talk, Wendy Simonds will discuss her book Hospital Land USA, in which she analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and idealogies impact our everyday experiences, culture, and social life. Simonds documents her own Hospital Land adventures and draws on a wide range of U.S. cultural representations - from memiors to medical mail, from hospital signs and advertisements to disease disaster movies - in order to urge critical thinking about conventional notions of care, health, enbodiment, identity, suffering, and mortality.

Wendy Simonds is Professor of Sociology and Graduate Director of Gerontology at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the author of Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic, Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines, and coauthor of Laboring On: Birth in Transition in the United States and Centuries of Solace: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Popular Literature. Simonds is co-editor of Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, now in its fifth edition.