Queer Activism, Citizenship, and the Age of Consent
Why aren’t gay, lesbian, trans, and queer people full citizens in law? This question enraged gay activists in 1990s Britain. The HIV/AIDS...
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JOANNA BOURKE
Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.
Apr 241 min read
Shameless! (just a few of the 'star' speakers)
The SHaME project have talked to some incredible people who reflect on sexual violence and ways to create rape-free worlds. You can...
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Apr 241 min read
Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence
The events I have enjoyed most in connection with the SHaME project were our two Shameless! Festivals of Activism Against Sexual...
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Apr 241 min read
SHaME: Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters
For five and a half years, I have been privileged to work with the SHaME team at Birkbeck. It has been the most intellectually rewarding...
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Feb 117 min read
The Strange Case of George Dedlow: Mutilation, Military Surgery, and Weir Mitchell
On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...
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Feb 1114 min read
History, Mental Health, and Psychiatry: 5 Shifts
Robairt Clough was a long-term patient at Holywell Psychiatric Hospital in Antrim (Northern Ireland). In the Christmas 1972 edition of...
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Feb 108 min read
Sleep: A History
Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...
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Feb 67 min read
Mastectomy, Fear, the Body: A History
In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...
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Feb 56 min read
Medical Professionals and Sexual Violence
On 12 June 1993, the editors of the British Medical Journal published an account by a male doctor of being sexually assaulted by another...
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Feb 54 min read
Domestic Violence and Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of human vulnerability. To be vulnerable (from the Latin ‘vulnus’, meaning ‘wound’) is to be...
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Feb 52 min read
Domestic Violence, Firearms, and Covid-19
Covid-19 exposed girls, women, and other minoritised groups to increased domestic violence. As has happened throughout the world, calls...
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Feb 52 min read
Rape Kits and the 'Technoscientific Witness of Rape'
Andrea Quinlan’s 2017 book The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science (University...
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Feb 54 min read
'Forgetting Rape': Proprandolo
What if nurses in A&E wards or staff at rape crisis centres could give rape victims a drug that would make them feel emotionally composed...
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Feb 54 min read
Domestic Violence During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
In 1918-19, the world was in the midst of a global influenza pandemic, that killed 50 million people (more than the 1914-18 war). When...
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Feb 523 min read
A (Very Short) History of Pain
Pain is a phantom, a spectre that haunts clinical encounters. Physical suffering is the chief symptom impelling people to seek medical...
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Feb 518 min read
Murder, Women & Police Surgeons: A History
25 February 1946. ‘Poor Mary’ (a.k.a. Mary of Hendon) lies murdered in a field, her petticoats in disarray. Trainee detectives pile out...
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Feb 517 min read
The Eye: A History
Cicero (106-43 B.C.): ‘Nature has given us eyes to declare our internal emotions’. Paulo Coelho (1947-): ‘The eyes are the mirror of the...
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Feb 516 min read
The Stomach: A History
Punch divided the stomach into four ‘Faculties’. It called the first the ‘Sustaining Faculty’, which dealt with foods that were essential...
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Feb 515 min read
Hair: A History
In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal was exposed for having lied about being of African American heritage. Dolezal was head of her local branch...
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Feb 517 min read
Feet (and Feetishism!)
The foot. Where will feet take us today? In the middle of a pandemic [I first wrote this blog during lock-down!], most of us will be...
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