Puberty: The Law of Biological Difference

Akosua Paries-Osei (Royal Holloway, University of London) specialises in enslaved women's ethnobotanical knowledge, at the intersection between racial science and racialised childhood sexual harm. Her work illuminates how current child sexual protections are both racist and, in many cases, shaped by slavery. Her work is part of the Natural History Museum’s permanent exhibition in the Hintze Hall. Her work is featured in the UNESCO Women in Science permanent exhibition, and she has recently produced a learning resource for the Mayor of London.

This paper will illuminate how slavery adultified and sexualised narratives of West African girlhood through the socio-medical lens of climate theory, a slavery informed discourse.

King Charles II twinned the Royal Society (medical science) with the Royal African Company (slavery) in 1662. Climate theory shaped the medical gaze regarding puberty and sexual reproductive capacities of African and enslaved girls. They were constructed as biologically different to Western girls through climatic discourses of puberty and precocious sexuality. These discourses were informed by slavery and legitimised by naturalists and scientists, many of them were from the Royal Society, including Hans Sloane and Carolus Linnaeus. 

Fellows of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific institution in the world wrote about the climatic effects of puberty throughout the eighteenth century. Their medical discourses were often a conduit through which pro-slavery narratives regarding African girlhood were normalised. Indeed, slavery – via the Royal African Company was pivotal in defining legal constructions of African girlhood in the period.

However, by the nineteenth century, these narratives had shaped the medical and legal discourses of obscenity. This definition legitimised the prurience of colonial photography and other scientific disciplines, including Anthropology and Ethnography, under the guise of scientific inquiry. Their sexualising and adultifying discourses reinforced their slavery informed socio-medical discourse on the precocity of African girlhood sexuality. This narrative would go on to shape the medical and legal discourses around puberty and sexual access to African and Black girls. My paper seeks to disrupt this narrative. I will unpack how slavery became the empirical source material for these medical, scientific, and legal discourses on African girlhood sexuality.