Indiana University student Bradley Lane was awarded the John Money Fellowship to develop his dissertation project, A Visual Politics of the Perverse: Sexual Predation and the ‘Perversion’ of American Visual Culture. Set to be the first dissertation offered in the field of Gender Studies in the nation, this project concerns the visual representation of sexual perversion in the twentieth-century United States, particularly through the figure of the sexual predator.

Combining interests in criminology, the law, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and the social and cultural history of various media, this fully interdisciplinary project considers the visual culture of perversion alongside the rise of the sexual predator as a figure of various ‘perverse’ incarnations in U.S. culture — including the old man, the homosexual, and the pedophile, for instance. Bradley's project will benefit from the ample resources which the Institute Library, Archives, and Art, Artifact and Photography collections hold regarding the scientific and social-scientific study of sexuality — particularly in its psychological and criminological forms.

As his contribution to the Institute’s resources for visiting scholars in his tenure as a John Money Fellow, Bradley produced a review essay of the Institute’s 1965 Sex Offender Study to serve as a ‘collection guide’ for other scholars, as well as an updated bibliography related to the Institute’s broader holdings on sex crime, sex offense, and sexual predation.

For more information about the John Money Scholarship for Students of Sexology, please visit our webpage here.