The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is pleased to announce the 2012 John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology has been awarded to Eli Vitulli of the University of Minnesota.

Eli Vitulli

The 2012 John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology has been awarded to Eli Vitulli, a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Eli Vitulli’s dissertation project, “Carceral Non-conformities: The US Prison System, Normativity, and the Gender Deviant Subject”, traces the history of the incarceration and criminalization of gender non-conforming and transgender people in the United States across the twentieth century.

Gender non-conforming people have long made up a small but significant part of US prison populations to whom jail and prison administrations as well as medical and social scientific scholarship on prisons have paid special attention.

Through an investigation of jails, prisons, and departments of corrections’ official and unofficial policies and practices regarding gender non-conforming prisoners, Elii's research critically examines the gendered logics of the US prison system as well as how the US prison system has affected transgender and gender non-conforming people’s lives and constructions of identity and community both inside and outside prison walls.

The project will also examine the relationship between the policies and practices of jails and prisons and legal, social scientific, and medical practices and knowledge production that have constructed understandings of gender non-conformity outside prison walls, particularly those that have produced understandings of certain kinds of gender non-conformity as criminal, pathological, and abnormal.

The John Money Fellowship will support his research in the Kinsey Institute’s archival holdings of prison-related materials as well as the Harry Benjamin collection.

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