I am an anthropologist with an interest in cultural and social aspects of disease and illness categories, treatment practices, health policy, and illness experience; the biomedicalization of difference; and social movements around health.
Since 1996 I've thought about these issues in the context of controversies over treatment for people with intersex conditions (or disorders of sex development) in the United States. My book based on this research, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience, was published by Duke University Press in 2008. My work was funded by the Social Science Research Council and The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Individual Research Grant and the Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship).
I frequently speak to academic, clinical, and lay audiences about my research, including the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, American Association of Law Schools, the American Psychological Association, and the Pediatric Endocrinology Nursing Society. I have also been interviewed about my work by the New York Times on several occasions, WNYC, and Abcnews.com, among others.
I have lectured on a wide range of issues at the interface between medicine and society having taught at the undergraduate and graduate level in schools of social sciences, public health, and medicine at Stanford and Columbia Universities, as well as Mills College. Through my teaching, I have sought to complicate an understanding of biomedicine by exploring multiple domains: the market relations that commodify health care; the work sites in which medical practices are articulated; the research arenas that transform medical knowledge, practice, and technologies; the systems of cultural meaning within which ideas of health and disease circulate; the social inequalities that structure the experience of illness and access to care; the social movements that challenge biomedical authority and expertise; and the bodies and selves that experience and are remade by illness. I am currently course coordinator and instructor for The Responsible Conduct of Research courses at Stanford University (Med255 and Med255C).
I received a PhD in medical and cultural anthropology from Columbia University, where I also received a Masters in Public Health in maternal and child health. I subsequently completed postdoctoral training in empirical bioethics at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University, where I currently hold the position of Senior Research Scholar. My undergraduate degree is in Public Policy from Occidental College.