The Gender and Sexual Politics of End-of-Life Care

a panel discussion with Susan Gerbino, Amber Hollibaugh, Ann Neumann, and Ai-Jen Poo
April 10, Tuesday
6 to 8 pm
Women – whether wives, mothers, daughters, or female (under)paid home or hospital healthcare workers – are disproportionately responsible for caring for the infirm and elderly in US society. This burden of care involves both extraordinary physical and emotional labor; sometimes it is paid (usually poorly); sometimes it is not. So many other issues to do with race, class, and national origin are implicated in this gendered burden. Our four panelists are uniquely positioned to address these issues and to help us collectively to ask, how the organization, provision, and imagination of healthcare across a lifespan would have to shift — for patients and for healthcare workers who do the hard labor of care — if we as a society sought to provide improved conditions under which the process of dying unfolds.
Susan Gerbino, Social Work, New York University
Amber Hollibaugh, Co-Executive Director, Queers for Economic Justice
Ann Neumann, Editor, The Revealer and journalist
Ai-Jen Poo, Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance
moderator: Robert Campbell, Associate Director, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612

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Susan Gerbino is Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. She is currently the Coordinator of Silver’s Westchester Campus and is the Director of the Post-Masters Certificate Program in Palliative and End-of-Life Care. Dr. Gerbino has a private practice specializing in work with people with chronic or life-threatening illnesses and complicated bereavement.
Amber Hollibaugh is the co-executive director of Queers for Economic Justice and has a long and distinguished history of organizing around health care as a social justice issue. Among other things she is the past director of National Initiatives at SAGE — Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders.
Ann Neumann is a journalist, a hospice volunteer, and editor of The Revealer, a publication of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media. She has written about health care and end of life care for The Nation, AlterNet and other publications and is currently writing a book about how Americans die.
Ai-Jen Poo is the director and visionary leader of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has recently introduced a campaign, Caring Across Generations, which connects the pressing need for quality care for the elderly to labor issues affecting healthcare workers and the gender and racial politics of just who (that is, whose bodies) does the labor of home health care.
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This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.
For more information, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Department of Performance Studies.


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