Interview by Justin Bengry Yorick Smaal’s recent book Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (Palgrave, 2015) looks to the dynamics of wartime to consider how sex and sexuality was affected by global conflict. Massive influxes of American servicemen transformed sexual communities, and […]
Tag: masculinity
Hirsute Histories: A Notches Special Issue
As Movember passes into Decembeard, Notches is showcasing some of our great publications that reflect upon the significance of sex, sexuality, and the bearded face. Taken together, these four posts illuminate the powerful meanings associated with facial hair, its employment in policing gender and sexuality, and how it fits into broader national and political questions that […]
“This is Your Pasty”: The Performance of Queer Domesticity in Small-Town Wisconsin
Two queer men elevated the simple pasty to a luxurious, gourmet meal.
The Hunger of the Finnish Bachelor: Married Men, Desire & Domesticity in 20th Century Finland
Summer widowers might attempt to recapture the erotic possibility of their single days.
Sex and the Single Man in Late Medieval England
Rachel Moss In May 1482, a harried Richard Cely wrote from London to his younger brother George, who was working in Calais. Three months earlier, in the midst of Shrovetide celebrations (a time of raucous good cheer before the privations of Lent), he had had a sexual encounter with their […]
Drunk Canadians in London, November 1916
Julia Laite The world has just commemorated the 100th annivesary of the beginning of the First World War. While most historians have come to categorize the war as, in the words of Richard Evans, ‘the seminal catastrophe of the entire period’, ideologically driven government officials and some military historians insist that […]
Death by Celibacy: Sex, Semen and Male Health in the Middle Ages
Katherine Harvey In the late twelfth century Gerald of Wales, archdeacon of Brecon and a prolific author, wrote a tract on the proper conduct of the clergy. Gerald was writing only a few decades after the First Lateran Council (1123) had introduced compulsory celibacy for all priests, at a time […]
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