Resources for Power, Privilege, and Inequity in Public Health (2022)
Morgan Flake
- Videos:
- Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? Available on Kanopy and on DVD at the LWTech library. This documentary series does a great job of explaining health disparities based on race, immigration status, socioeconomic status, etc.
- The Mask You Live In – available on Kanopy. This is my favorite documentary. It explains how, while cisgender men have a privileged status in U.S. society, they are negatively affected by sexism because of its narrow definition of manhood. An important watch especially given all the recent news of mass shootings.
- Articles:
- Constructions of Masculinity and Their Influence on Men’s Well-Being: A Theory of Gender and Health. This is my favorite academic article. As you can see I am obsessed with the social construction of masculinity. This article not only explains how men have worse health outcomes than women but also helps explain racial and socioeconomic health disparities among men.
- Podcasts:
- 1619 Project: How the Bad Blood Started. This episode of the 1619 Project explains some of the histories of racism in medicine.
- Scene on Radio: Seeing White. This podcast is great for white listeners who are having trouble coming to terms with the fact that racism still exists and impacts all of us. I offer this as an additional optional resource, not required because I don’t think it’s really necessary that students of color listen to it. There is some valuable and important history, but I think the target audience is really white people. I would be interested if anyone has thoughts on that.
- Activities:
- One activity I have students do when we learn about the relationship between gender and health is to chart health behaviors in terms of how healthy they are on one axis and how masculine to feminine they are on the other. I have big cut-out pieces of paper when we are in person that says things like “eating a salad” and “riding a motorcycle without a helmet.” Online, I have students do this in breakout groups in a Word document with one student sharing their screen. The same pattern pretty quickly emerges each time: the healthier behaviors are seen as more feminine and the less healthy/more risky behaviors are seen as more masculine. There are some that students will disagree on, but I think this activity is valuable for two reasons: first, the near-perfect agreement that students have about how these behaviors fall on a spectrum of masculine to feminine demonstrates how fully inculcated we are with gender expectations, even about things that one might initially imagine have nothing to do with gender, like eating a salad. Second, it is a tactile and visual activity that makes clear how gender expectations influence health.
