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Thesis ID: CBB001567508

Materia Medica: Black Women, White Doctors and Spectacular Gynecology in the Ninteenth-Century U.S. (2013)

Stepto, Robert
Nelson, Alondra
Yale University
Nelson, Alondra
Wexler, Laura
Publication date: 2013
Language: English

ISBN: 9781303296888

Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Advisor: Stepto, Robert, Wexler, Laura; Committee Members: Nelson, Alondra.
Physical Details: 212 pp.

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PubMed

Medicine Slavery Discrimination Testing Racism Gynecology Human rights 19th century

The dissertation, "Materia Medica: Black Women, White Doctors and Spectacular Gynecology in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.," considers the rhetoric and practices through which enslaved persons were divested of the rights to their own flesh and reconstituted as biological test subjects who were open to interpretation. Deploying an interdisciplinary methodology that brings critical race theory, visual culture studies, and literary close reading to bear on the history of trans-Atlantic slavery and medicine, the project investigates how the anatomized bodies of the enslaved provided a physical terrain upon--and through--which white male fantasies of mastery, practice, and perfection could be played out. It locates the nineteenth-century expansion of gynecological science within the larger context of U.S. legal and medical discourses on sovereignty, personhood, and racialized sexuality. By analyzing a network of nineteenth-century U.S. gynecological surgeons along with the reports, articles and images they left behind, the project endeavors to place extant archival (re)sources in the service of foregrounding the black women's lives that unfolded at the intersection of Southern antebellum slave economies and the industry of dissection. It argues that enslaved women were materially and spectrally present in figurations of gynecological knowledge even as they were excluded from legal and social definitions of womanhood. The dissertation considers what it might mean for one woman to be examined for the benefit of another: What might it mean for black women's bodies to be at the center of national and international medical discourses? Moreover, how is the history of U.S. medicine imbricated in the histories of U.S. slavery and the Western freak show?

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/11(E), May 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1432523701.

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