Pornography: A History
Pornography is divisive. It is guaranteed to incite heated debates between people inhabiting different subject positions based on...
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JOANNA BOURKE
Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.
- Feb 5
- 20 min
Sexual Perversion: A History
What do we mean when we talk about the ‘perversions’? Who gets to decide what is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’? The concept of ‘perversion’ is...
80
- Feb 5
- 19 min
Sexual Pleasure: A History
Throughout human history, sexual danger has regulated social lives and subjectivities. From the ‘yellow press’ of the late nineteenth...
50
- Feb 5
- 4 min
What is a University? Birkbeck College
Walking into the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution (as it was then called) in the 1890s could be a dispiriting experience....
50
- Feb 5
- 5 min
Sexual Assault in the Military
Sexual violence and abuse are ingrained into military cultures. Armed conflict not only radically lowers the threshold at which...
70
- Feb 5
- 4 min
Self-Defence for Women: A History
In the 1870s, middle-class women carried ‘dagger-fans’ when alone in public places; in the early 1900s, they hosted ‘jujitsu parties’ for...
140
- Feb 5
- 7 min
Military '#MeToo'
In this blog, I reflect on the devastating conclusions of a report by the Defense Committee (25 July 2021) entitled ‘Protecting Those Who...
20
- Jan 10
- 1 min
bell hooks (on her death): Inspirations Series
bell hooks has been an enduring presence in my life. I first read her 1981 classic Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism as an...
30
- Jan 7
- 6 min
Breast Cancer: A History
Suddenly feeling a lump in one’s breast is terrifying, yet it is an experience suffered by one in every eight women in Britain and...
00
- Jan 3
- 9 min
Digital Ways of Dying
A fortnight ago, a friend sent me a light-hearted reminder that it was her birthday in a few days. She does this every year. The problem...
40
- Jan 3
- 7 min
Headache: A History
In 1964, author and critic Susan Sontag published a little-known short story entitled ‘Man with a Pain’. It is an eloquent reflection not...
20
- Jan 3
- 5 min
Sexual Assault: The Courtroom
Review of Heather R. Hlavka and Sameena Mulla’s Bodies in Evidence. Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (New York:...
30
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