A is for Absence/A is for Asymmetry: Using Archives to Theorize the Absence of Black Girlhood in Histories of Pedophilia

April 8, 2013

Lunchtime talk by Kelly Ball, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, Emory University.
In 1899, Dr. Silas Arrowood, a white physician in Atlanta, Georgia was prosecuted for pursuing his sexual interest in young white girls. Arrowood’s case reveals the complexities of archival research on girlhood, especially as such research seeks to understand the construction of categories of sexual abnormality. Drawing on archival research on the Georgia Lunatic Asylum (the largest in the world in the late 1800s/early 1900s, with over 60,000 patients and inmates), the paper problematizes Foucault’s theories on the expanding system of sexuality that made these new categories of sexual abnormality possible.

Woolley Room, Mary Lyon Hall  12:30pm

 

Sponsored by: Women’s Studies, SHAG, DWOC, SMART and FAW

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