Seminars

Abstract

The excerpted chapter, "Speciated Crossings: Fishwives and the Limits of Sex and Species," brings together a social and economic history of women in the fishing industry, with an inquiry into scientific and popular discourses and understandings of sex, gender, and species. Women fish sellers are largely absent from histories of gendered labor and capitalism, yet they literally carried one of Britain’s most historically significant economies on their backs. They were at once a reminder of
Britain’s long standing dependence on the economies of the sea and an indicator of the startling potential of an economy significantly controlled by women, particularly along the eastern coastline of Scotland and England. In a period obsessed with the confines of categorization, fishwives themselves, and contemporary representations of them, dangerously transgressed and crossed borders.