Research Catalog

Title

Depraved and disorderly : female convicts, sexuality and gender in Colonial Australia / Joy Damousi.

Author

Damousi, Joy.

Publication

Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 221 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

This 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.

Subject

• 1800-1899
• Geschichte 1788-1850
• Women prisoners > Australia > History > 19th century
• Criminals > Rehabilitation > History > Australia > 19th century
• Women prisoners > Australia > Sexual behavior
• Prisoners > history
• Women > history
• Gender Identity > history
• Sexual Behavior

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-210) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

pt. 1. Sexuality, Punishment and Resistance. 1. Chaos and Order: Gender, Space and Sexuality on Female Convict Ships. 2. 'Depravity and Disorder': The Sexuality of Convict Women. 3. Disrupting the Boundaries: Resistance and Convict Women. 4. Defeminising Convict Women: Headshaving as Punishment in the Female Factories -- pt. 2. Family Life and the Convict System. 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.

ISBN

• 0521583233 (hardback)
• 0521587239 (paperback)

LCCN

^^^96046423^

OCLC

• 35723679
• SCSB-10256016

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library