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Intersections between Popular Culture, Sexuality, and Health Flyer
The goal of this program is to stimulate dialogue across disciplinary lines on issues concerning the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, cultural imagery and health research and policy. Each panel will include scholars from different disciplinary perspectives with the goal of illuminating key issues that could inform current theory and practice addressing sexual health disparities. 

The panels will address violence against women and HIV/AIDS, which remain subjects of major concern in the field of public health. At the same time, these issues generate various competing cultural narratives as well as scholarship in the humanities and sociology. Much of this discourse struggles with questions of individual autonomy, responsibility and blame. For example, can we question the decisions of survivors of violence without falling into victim-blaming? In thinking about Truvada, a medication recommended for gay men by the federal government to prevent HIV/AIDS, can we examine gay and bisexual men’s sexual decision-making without engaging in “slut shaming”? How do we navigate the tension between respecting autonomy and combatting oppression?

SPEAKERS

Alisa Bierria
Associate Director
University of California, Berkeley 
Center for Race & Gender

David Frost
Assistant Professor of Population and Family Health 
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Octavio R. Gonzalez 
Assistant Professor of English
Wellesley College

Emily Rothman
Associate Professor, Community Public Health
Boston University School of Public Health

MODERATORS

Denise Herd
Associate Professor of Behavioral Sciences
Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster
University of California, Berkeley

Russell Robinson
Distinguished Haas Chair in LGBT Equity Professor of Law
Professor, Berkeley Law

This event is sponsored by the LGBTQ Cluster and the Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster of HIFIS and co-sponsored by Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, and Center for Race and Gender.