Justin Bengry On April 13, 2014, Itella Posti Oy, the Finnish postal service, announced the release in September of what are possibly the most openly erotic postage stamps to appear anywhere in mainstream circulation. The series of three stamps commemorate the work of Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), better known as Tom […]
Tag: historical sources
The Erotics of Shaving in Victorian Britain
Justin Bengry Beardedness, or alternatively clean-shavenness, has long been an important signifier of manliness, inscribing crucial gender and sexual meanings onto the male body. But fashions in shaving are notoriously unstable, even in the nineteenth century, that idyll for the hirsute among us. Beardedness in nineteenth-century Britain, in fact, only […]
‘In the manner of a woman’: John/Eleanor Rykener and the Inessentiality of Gender
Kim Racon On what was likely a cold Sunday night in Cheapside, London, in December 1394, John Britby passed through the high road, catching the eye of a woman called Eleanor. She was bundled up but still held his attention. He approached her and asked her to have sex with […]
Love, Lust and Procreation: Debating Sex in Nineteenth-century Medicine?
Elisabeth Brander Nineteenth-century medical texts are extremely diverse in the topics they cover. They range from specialized works meant to be used by trained physicians and surgeons, to books of practical home remedies, to treatises on phrenology. They also offer much more than strictly medical advice – many of the […]
The Allure of the Castrato
Lisa Smith The typical Valentine’s Day menu highlights aphrodisiac foods, suggesting that it is a day to celebrate lust as much as love. To this end, I offer you an introduction to one of the sex symbols of the eighteenth century: the castrato. Eighteenth-century Europeans had known about eunuchs for […]
Incoherent or Invigorated? The History of Sexuality
Justin Bengry By what metric do we measure the vitality of the History of Sexuality? If the overwhelming attendance at the launch of the new IHR seminar asking ‘What is the History of Sexuality?’ is anything to go by, it is far from dead, and scholars remain eager to further […]
Hyperbole and horror: hijras and the British imperial state in India
Onni Gust Nineteenth-century British travel writers and colonial officials rarely passed on the opportunity to prefix some derogatory hyperbole to the word ‘eunuch.’ Frequently they offered extensive defamation, referring to eunuchs as “the vilest and most polluted beings” and commenting on the “revolting” practices that they imagined, but could rarely […]
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