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JOANNA BOURKE
Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.
Feb 5, 202418 min read
Monogamy: A History
Why is monogamy such a big deal? What can a history of fidelity and infidelity reveal about the changing rights, duties, and social...
20
Feb 5, 202420 min read
Pornography: A History
Pornography is divisive. It is guaranteed to incite heated debates between people inhabiting different subject positions based on...
60
Feb 5, 202420 min read
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...
150
Feb 5, 202419 min read
Sexual Pleasure: A History
Throughout human history, sexual danger has regulated social lives and subjectivities. From the ‘yellow press’ of the late nineteenth...
110
Feb 5, 20244 min read
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...
1260
Jan 10, 20241 min read
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, 20246 min read
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, 20249 min read
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, 20247 min read
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...
40
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