Past Event

‘The Unexpected Horrible Side Effect of this Law’: the criminalization of inter-racial sex and white male suicide in South Africa, 1950-1985.

A public lecture by Susanne M. Klausen, Professor of History, Carleton University in Ottawa, Senior Research Associate, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg and 2018 Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow

When: Thursday 22nd February 2018

Where: Austin Lecture Theatre, Arts, UWA

Cost: Free

RSVP Here

Professor Susanne Klausen is the author of numerous essays and two monographs: Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and the prizewinning Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is currently working on two research projects. The first is a study of the Immorality (Amendment) Act (1950) that criminalized inter-racial sexual relationships between whites and other “races” in South Africa until 1985. This study aims to understand the methods the state utilized to police inter-racial sexual relationships, and the racialized and gendered impact on South Africans of arrest and public exposure for contravening the law. The second project is a transnational history of legalized eugenic abortion in British Commonwealth countries. Funded initially by the Wellcome Trust, this project explains the inclusion of a eugenic clause in the British Abortion Act (1967) and the uptake of that clause in subsequent abortion legislation enacted in Commonwealth jurisdictions. She received her PhD in History from Queen’s University at Kingston in 1999 and is the recipient of numerous research awards.

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