Why aren’t gay, lesbian, trans, and queer people full citizens in law? This question enraged gay activists in 1990s Britain. The HIV/AIDS...

Caption: Reception for the Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence. Left to right: Professor Joanna Bourke, Julia...

I loved working with the SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters) team over 5 and a half years. SHaME’s Public Engagement Lead, Dr...

The SHaME project have talked to some incredible people who reflect on sexual violence and ways to create rape-free worlds. You can...

The events I have enjoyed most in connection with the SHaME project were our two Shameless! Festivals of Activism Against Sexual...

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...

Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the...

Clare Shaw, Towards a General Theory of Love (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022)     Clare Shaw’s new, prize-winning poetry collection is...

What do we get when we lend our ears to Eric Hobsbawm? Passion. Energy. Exhilarating sweeps of time; giddy swoops into political darkness...

The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual...

Jude Kelly is known to millions of people around the world. She is a theatre director, with more than 100 productions to her name....

On 4 March 2020, the Black feminist organisation Imkaan launched a report in the Houses of Parliament on sexual violence against...

Andrea Quinlan’s 2017 book The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science ...

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...

On 21 June 1986, nine American women removed their shirts in a park in Rochester, New York. They were protesting against a law which...

This is a short piece from my book, Disgrace (Reaktion Books, 2022) Sexual violence: it is a difficult subject to talk about. There is...

In September 1971, Ebony magazine published an article that broke a major taboo: a survivor of breast cancer wrote candidly about her...

Between 25 and 40 million people worldwide have died as a result of opportunistic infections arising from AIDS or Acquired...

In April 1973, cinemas throughout America began screening a tearjerking love story, the plot of which revolved around sickle cell...

A few weeks before writing this blog, I was launching a book that I had recently published. A former PhD student of mine and someone I...