"Love is a Sweet Insanity": The Hidden Gender Revolutions of the 19th-Century Asylum

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the 19th century, a new impulse toward the humane treatment of the insane prompted the establishment of lunatic hospitals across the United States and Europe. Within the normalizing disciplinary regime of these asylums, expressions of gender nonconformity and “deviant sexual instinct” (i.e., homosexuality) were pathologized, while adherence to bourgeois standards of gendered behavior were treated as the metric for recovery. As a result of these practices, medical practitioners were invested with moral authority, while challenges to the gender binary and heteronormativity of 19th-century society were subject to suppression and erasure as “symptoms” of insanity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how archaeologists and historians can recover the heretofore hidden gender revolutions that occurred within and against the disciplinary regime of the asylum, with a particular focus on the mobilization of material objects and practices of the body as instruments of protest.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 311