Sex workers, working as peer researchers, mapped the epidemiology of HIV in 1985.
Tag: prostitution
Sex on the Home Front: Venereal Disease and the Topography of Heterosexuality
On July 26, 1942, a solider in the U.S. military found out that he had recently contracted a venereal disease.
“When Sex Threatened the State”: An Interview with Saheed Aderinto
Interview by Pat Omoregie Saheed Aderinto’s When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (Illinois, 2015), explores tensions in colonial Nigeria through the lens of a struggle over how to control and regulate prostitution. Aderinto argues that the British perceived prostitution as evidence 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 […]
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 […]
Sex, race and censorship in Cuba: Historicising the P.M. affair
Carrie Hamilton In late 1960, not quite two years after the revolutionary victory of 1959, two young Cuban filmmakers, Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal, set out with a handheld camera, a small recording device and a limited supply of film to record shots of Havana nightlife. The result was P.M., […]
Historians are gossips who tease the dead
Julia Laite I have recently been pondering Voltaire’s much quoted but rarely contextualized observation that ‘historians are gossips who tease the dead’. It goes to the heart of something that’s been bothering me ever since I dug further into the details of a case of a young woman who had appeared in my […]
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