Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia

ISBN-13: 9780521587235 / Angielski / Miękka / 1997 / 232 str.

Joy Damousi

Opis

This innovative book tells the powerful stories of convict women, while drawing out broader themes of gender and sexual disorder and race and class dynamics. It looks at the cultural meanings of aspects of life in the colony: on ships, in the factories and in orphanages. Damousi considers such topics as headshaving as punishment in the prisons, as well as analyzing the language of pollution, purity and abandonment. The book shows how understanding about sexual and racial difference became a focus for cultural anxiety in colonial society.

Recenzje

'This is an excitingly formulated, ambitiously researched and, in its writing and careful editing, an elegantly evocative reading experience.' Australian Historical Studies

Spis treści

Part I. Sexuality, Resistance and Punishment: 1. Chaos and order: gender, space and sexuality on female convict ships; 2. Depraved and disorderly: the sexuality of convict women; 3. Disrupting the boundaries: resistance and convict women; 4. Defeminising convict women: headshaving as punishment in the female factories; Part II. Familt Life and Convictism: 5. Convict mothering; 6. Wretchedness and vice: the 'orphan' and the colonial imagination; 7. Abandonment, flight and absence: motherhood and fatherhood during the 1820s and 1830s; Conclusion.