This month’s ep features Kathy Brown discussing her forthcoming book Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity. In this work, Brown continues her career-long attention to the history of the body by documenting how early abolitionist work emerged alongside developments in medicine and law that determined how knowledge about bodies was produced. She discusses Black personhood, motherhood, and reproductive labor following the “official” end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, demonstrating how this labor system reproduced itself by colonizing the bodies of enslaved women, and she articulates a body-centered politics to show how material analysis of bodily injustice can work to undo medical and scientific racism.
Original Music by David Chavannes
For more information about the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies visit www.gsws.sas.upenn.edu