Abstract
How do nonfiction narratives reflect, influence, and challenge our perceptions regarding health discourses, especially human health threats? Drawing from health/environmental humanities, disability studies, and literary nonfiction, this interdisciplinary study analyzes how literature serves as both archive and intervention in understanding embodied health experiences and healing practices. Through close analysis of Dolen Perkins’ Take My Hand—a novel rooted in the documented sterilization abuses of Montgomery, Alabama in 1973—this research reveals how haunting eugenic practices targeting Black women’s reproductive autonomy continue to shape present-day healthcare experiences and literary representation. This paper argues that the “ghosts” of segregation-era medical violence persist as embodied silences within African American women’s health narratives, creating what I term “post-segregational hauntologies”—the ways in which past eugenic trauma infiltrates contemporary discourse while remaining systematically unspoken. The study demonstrates how Perkins’ literary intervention functions as both testimony and resistance, breaking decades of institutional silence surrounding forced sterilizations and medical experimentation on Black women’s bodies. This analysis illuminates the pervasive erasure of African American women’s reproductive trauma from both medical histories and literary canons, revealing how these absences perpetuate ongoing health disparities and cultural amnesia. By positioning literature as a site of healing and historical recovery, the research contributes to growing scholarship in medical humanities while advancing critical race theory’s engagement with embodied memory and institutional violence. The findings reveal how literary narratives can serve as crucial interventions in public health discourse, transforming silenced histories into tools for contemporary resistance and healing.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Beyond Borders: The Role of the Humanities in Reimagining Communities
KEYWORDS
HEALTH HUMANITITES, POST-SEGREGATION, LITERARY NONFICTION, DISABILITY STUDIES, RACISM, HEALTH DISPARITIES
