(En)Gendering Cure: An Exploration of Gender Construction at a Twentieth Century Southern Asylum

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I explore the way gender is conjured at an early twentieth century North Carolina Asylum through its organization of space and patients’ movement in this space. I consider the way that gender is maintained, reified, and produced through archival research on the Raleigh State Asylum of North Carolina. The built landscape of the Raleigh State Asylum functioned as a medical technology for its patients and was entangled with projects of cure that sought to transform patients into suitable North Carolinian subjects. In many cases, as this research demonstrates, this entailed a gendered transformation. I argue that the hospital’s gendered landscape was an integral medical technology operationalized at the Raleigh State Asylum. This paper relies on critical archival research and offers an alternative to excavation-based investigations into materiality and meaning.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41511.0