WSU 102 Culture, Health, and Medicine

Diane Israel explores American culture's unhealthy preoccupation with thinness, beauty, and physical perfection. Israel, a Boulder-based psychotherapist and former champion triathlete, recounts how she grew up feeling intense pressure to be beautiful and successful -- and how, as a result, she raced headlong into a devastating and near-fatal spiral of disordered eating and obsessive exercising. Along the way, BEAUTY MARK provides crucial insights into the relationship between media culture, gender norms, and girls' and women's health.

Produced by and featuring Ricki Lake, Abby Epstein's documentary praises natural childbirth and uses graphic home-birth footage and interviews to argue that pregnancy is not a disease.

The Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) is a unique sort of trade union, first created in the state of Gujarat. In 1998, it has 217,000 members throughout the sub-continent. SEWA has set out to organize India's countless extremely poor women, whether they work at home, in the street or in the fields, doing a variety of jobs but having no permanent employer so that they may be considered self employed. Issued from many different religious and caste backgrounds, the SEWA women have created their own cooperative bank. SEWA is also concerned about such issues as health and training. Inventive and courageous, these women have stepped out from the shadow. The film tells the story of SEWA with the voices of six of its members.