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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JOANNA BOURKE
Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.
- Apr 24
- 1 min
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...
30
- Apr 24
- 1 min
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...
30
- Feb 11
- 7 min
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...
100
- Feb 11
- 14 min
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...
550
- Feb 10
- 8 min
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...
120
- Feb 6
- 7 min
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...
50
- Feb 5
- 6 min
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...
10
- Feb 5
- 4 min
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...
00
- Feb 5
- 2 min
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...
70
- Feb 5
- 2 min
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...
00
- Feb 5
- 4 min
'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...
30
- Feb 5
- 4 min
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...
40
- Feb 5
- 23 min
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...
40
- Feb 5
- 18 min
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...
10
- Feb 5
- 17 min
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...
60
- Feb 5
- 15 min
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...
100
- Feb 5
- 15 min
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...
80
- Feb 5
- 17 min
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...
00
- Feb 5
- 16 min
Clitoris and Penis: A History
This blog comes with a warning: it is not for those delicate of hearing or squeamish of stomach because today I am writing about two sex...
20
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