“Predictable Failures” in the Trayvon Martin Story: Excerpts from The Private Bodies, Public Texts Salon
Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway gathered several scholars whose expertise lies at the cross-section of law, race, gender, and bioethics, to respond to Karla FC Holloway’s book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press, 2011), an important and groundbreaking work that examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere, calling for a new cultural bioethics that attends to the complex histories of race, gender, and class in the US.
Several of the panelists at the salon, which took place on March 21, 2012, the same night as the million hoodie march, spoke poignantly about the ways in which the themes of Holloway’s book apply in the case of Trayvon Martin’s death. In particular, they address the painful consequences of substituting identities for bodies (or persons) and the concept of “predictable ethical failures” that arise when privacy is not seen as applicable to certain bodies.
This video includes excerpts from the salon featuring Alondra Nelson, Karla FC Holloway, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Tina Campt. Video of the full panel, which includes further discussion of the ways Martin’s death fits into troubling patterns in American history, is available here.