Scandal erupted in a Philadelphia marketplace one Saturday morning in August 1839.
Tag: nineteenth century
Archives of Desire: James Huneker “Nosophilia: A Nordau Heroine”
Discussions of “deviant” sexuality were visible and vibrant within artistic and literary communities.
Queers, Homosexuals, and Activists in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain?
Charles Upchurch What does a historian of sexuality do when confronted with something that looks compellingly modern, but decades before it was supposed to exist? Specifically, I mean evidence of identity and political activism built around a positive interpretation of same-sex desire in the 1820s. The evidence, although fragmentary and […]
Bestiality in a Time of Smallpox
Rob Boddice The news is rife with fearful accounts of disease — influenza is epidemic and measles is re-emergent — and debates about how to inoculate against them. Opponents of vaccination, meanwhile, are fanning the flames of fear. Measles, for example, is entirely preventable, but remains among us because of […]
Uncovering Cleveland Street: Sexuality, Surveillance and late-Victorian Scandal
Katie Hindmarch-Watson In the summer of 1889 a 15-year-old London telegraph boy named Charles Swinscow had a monumental encounter with his inspector. Charles had eighteen shillings in his pockets, more than twice his weekly salary. Postal Constable Luke Hanks, after discovering this suspicious amount, extracted a statement from Charles that […]
Clitoridectomies: Female Genital Mutilation c.1860-2014
Agnes Arnold-Forster Over the last year Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) has received significant media attention in Britain. Leyla Hussein’s film The Cruel Cut aired on Channel 4 in November 2013, in March 2014 the first people in the UK were charged under the 2003 FGM Act, and in July 2014 UNICEF and […]
"What a Woman Is": Breast Cancer, Sexuality and the Unreconstructed Self
Agnes Arnold-Forster The manifesto of Monokini 2.0, a social art project centred on swimwear designed for women who have had a mastectomy, advocates, We think that the current focus on a breast-reconstruction after mastectomy as the only way to a full life, is a breast-fixated way of seeing what a woman […]
Recent Posts
Understanding Zika & the Abortion Debate in Brazil: A View from 1940
Naming & Shaming Women: Reporting on VD Trials During WWI
Syphilis Onstage: Eugène Brieux’s Damaged Goods
The Catholic Church and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Reverend Anna Garlin Spencer and the Rise of “Family Life” in Early Sex Education