Invisible Women: Prenatal Nutrition Research and the Vanishing Maternal Body -- talk by Meredith Reiches

The body of a pregnant woman, according to twentieth century Western biomedical models, functions both as a passive receptacle through which energy and nutrients reach the fetus, and as a vicious competitor for those same resources. This talk explores the influence of these dual models on the science of prenatal nutrition, focusing on which data inform public health interventions and which slip under the medical and cultural radar.

Meredith Reiches is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UMass Boston.

Bodies / Archives / Databases

Our museums and computers store bodies. Some are physical, appearing as material objects or as the “negative space” around them, and others are abstracted.

The 2016-17 Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series interrogates the space between the archive, site of haunted specificity and historical embeddedness, and the database, locus of standardization and generalizable knowledge about human normativity, pathology, and variation.

All events take place from 5-7 pm in the Plimpton Room (Barker Center 133, 12 Quincy St.) and are open to the public.

Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.