Enfleshing the criminal : producing and policing Black (sexual) difference in the criminological imagination
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Enfleshing the Criminal: Producing and Policing Black (Sexual) Difference in the Criminological Imagination scrutinizes the truth claims that undergirded the postbellum emergence of the "criminal" as a coherent object of scientific study. It argues that visual-cultural consensus about the picturability of sexual deviance in the Black female (maternal) body enabled the trajectory of criminological "empiricism" as it migrated from Italian anthropology to U.S. disciplinary practice, satisfying particular postbellum political needs by reinvigorating the logics of antebellum anti-Blackness with positivist rationale. This reliance of empirical analysis on subjective habits of seeing becomes clear when one reads key texts of criminology alongside their contemporary cultural objects. The cultural objects offer insight into the political desires of postbellum publics and cultural habits of seeing through which they were worked through—desires which are far less explicit in the scientific writing but which thoroughly constrained the ways in which the Black female (maternal) body "empirically" appeared. The project simultaneously attends to the ways that postbellum black artists and writers expressively experimented with the terms on which racialized gender subsequently appeared in dominant discourses of knowledge. In so doing, it joins several other works of black feminist and queer theory that use black expressive culture to problematize early professional science's oppressive program of racial-sexual difference. Yet it also complicates this work by carefully attending to the ways that Black writers' and artists' efforts to disentangle Blackness from criminality, though usually motivated by sound political intentions, sometimes recapitulated the violence of these empiricist paradigms and their enabling truth claims—particularly in their imaginings of Black women and queers. Ultimately, the project is invested in deconstructing the coherence of criminal discourse's program of difference by examining its key thinkers' commitments to seeing sexual deviance as the Black female body's pathological inheritance. But the project also insists on seeing the complexity in Black expressive culture, unburdening it of the political desires that engender its overdetermination as an archive of resistance
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Washington, Henry, Jr. |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Brody, Jennifer DeVere |
| Thesis advisor | Brody, Jennifer DeVere |
| Thesis advisor | Elam, Harry Justin |
| Thesis advisor | Robinson, Aileen |
| Thesis advisor | Scott, Darieck |
| Thesis advisor | Wallace, Maurice O. (Maurice Orlando), 1967- |
| Degree committee member | Elam, Harry Justin |
| Degree committee member | Robinson, Aileen |
| Degree committee member | Scott, Darieck |
| Degree committee member | Wallace, Maurice O. (Maurice Orlando), 1967- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Henry Washington, Jr. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022 |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/gv480rw8143 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Henry Washington, Jr.
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