Dr. Jennifer Eun-Jung Row (University of Minnesota, French & Italian)

The Hôtel Royal des Invalides (1676) was originally built as a venerated residence for disabled veterans. The 17th-century floor plans reveal another side of the story, however. Disabled veterans were taxonomized by their disabilities and forced into labor. Extensive disciplinary governance propagated ableist beliefs that the disabled are a “problem” that must be corralled away from the public to prevent mendicancy or disorder. When the institution became overcrowded, disabled veterans were often redeployed to distant colonies. Dr. Row will examine this history in conjunction with fragments of late 17th-century letters from Louisiana governors who rejected the disabled veterans redeployed there and disparaged the French women sent for sexual companionship and to populate the territory. Dr. Row discusses the racialized and entangled dynamics related to sexuality, disability, productivity, and reproduction evident in these documents.

Center for Bioethics & Health Law Health Humanities Lecture Series

Sponsored by the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, the European Studies Center, and the Department of French and Italian

Jennifer Row is Associate Professor of French at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and affiliate faculty in Theater Arts and Dance and Race, Indigeneity, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Row’s research and teaching interests include queer theory, disability studies, early modern theater (French and English), dance and performance studies, the history of sexuality, and affect theory. Her book Queer Velocities: Time, Sex and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, (Northwestern University Press, 2022) examines new affects and queer desires wrought by the staging of temporal intensities (slownesses and speeds) and the impact of such queer affects on an emerging biopolitics.

To Register: https://bioethics.pitt.edu/event/make-more-inhabitants-disability-sexuality-and-race-early-modern-france

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