Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones In the first week of July, we were among over two hundred historians who attended the Rethinking Modern British Studies conference at the University of Birmingham. Alongside our own panel on religion and sexuality, a number of the plenary speakers and the concurrent sessions […]
Tag: British history
Why I Oppose a General Pardon for Historical Convictions for Homosexual Offences
Justin Bengry UK Labour Party leadership contender Andy Burnham recently proposed automatic pardons for all men convicted of historical homosexual offences that are no longer crimes. This has been an ongoing conversation in the UK, which in 2013 granted WWII Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing a posthumous royal pardon. The issue reappeared […]
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 […]
Sexuality, Family Planning, and the British Left: An Interview with Stephen Brooke
Interview by David Minto A sweeping account of sexuality and socialism in twentieth century Britain, Stephen Brooke’s Sexual Politics has the feel of a traditional political history even as it foregrounds a subject still too often ignored in the analysis of political modernity. Demonstrating how leftist organizing shaped national battles over abortion, […]
Sexual Politics in the Era of Reagan and Thatcher: Marc Stein in Conversation with Jeffrey Weeks
Interview by Marc Stein In May 1988, when I was working as the coordinating editor of Gay Community News in Boston, Massachusetts, I interviewed Jeffrey Weeks, the influential British sociologist and historian who had written Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977), Sex, Politics, […]
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 […]
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