Depraved and Disorderly
Depraved and Disorderly
$43.99
USDThis innovative book marks a new way of looking at convict women. It tells their stories in a powerful and evocative way, drawing out broader themes of gender and sexual disorder and race and class dynamics in a colonial context. It considers the convict past in light of contemporary concerns, looking at the cultural meanings of aspects of life in the colony: on ships, in the factories and in orphanages. Using startlingly original research, Joy Damousi considers such varied topics as headshaving as punishment in the prisons and the subversive nature of laughter and play, as well as analysing the language of pollution, purity and abandonment. She also dicusses the nature of sexual relationships, including evidence of lesbianism. The book shows how understanding about sexual and racial difference was crucial for both the maintenance and disturbance of colonial society, and became a focus for cultural anxiety.
- Innovative approach to convict history, especially history of convict women
- Includes striking new research, including evidence of lesbian relationships
Reviews & endorsements
"Scholarly and well documented, with complete bibliography and index, the study will be useful for upper-division undergraduates and above." Choice
"...this is a compelling study that makes an important contribution to knowledge about Australia's colonial past." Kay Schaffer, American Historical Review
"...Damousi is quite successful with a study that is based on thorough going research in archival and published sources, that is full of engrossing detail, that reads extremely well, and that does indeed move the historiography of convicts into the realm of cultural studies in a convincing manner. ...Depraved and Disorderly makes fascinating reading..." William H. Worger, American Journal of Sociology
"...Damousi's analysis of convict childhood and the ways that orphans could register their dissent from controls through gossiping and sulking is excellent. Damousi is most interested in reading cultural symbols and signs as a way of understanding various representations and relationships in the convict period: masculinity and femininity, the body and sexuality, anrenthood and childhood, cleanliness and order, play and resistance, space and race. These representations and relationships form the unifying ideas of Depraved and Disorderly..." Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol.9
"[Damousi] explores the psychological meanings of masculinity and femininity and, throughout the book, probes the images of pollution that female sexuality raised in many minds--not just pollution of the body but of family and society as well. It is Damousi's ability to make clear the broad nature of her themes that is the underlying strength of this work." Law and History Review
"Depraved and Disorderly, as a penal and colonial history of gender and sexuality. challenges new generations of historians of Australia to explore illuminating terrain in productive, often intriguing terms." Victorian Studies
Product details
March 2011Adobe eBook Reader
9780511823510
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 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.
