Rebecca Saunders At the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition ‘The Institute of Sexology’, visitors must surreptitiously part a curtain to peer at a rosy clay vagina set inside a bifurcated case. Made in the early twentieth century as a teaching aid for health professionals, the Gynaeplaque sits behind a glass pane covered in fingerprints […]
Tag: public engagement
Sexual Histories, Scholarly Communities: A Dispatch from the John D’Emilio Symposium
Ian Darnell On September 12, the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) held a symposium to honor the career of Professor Emeritus John D’Emilio. Early in the day, Pippa Holloway—once D’Emilio’s research assistant and student—observed that a hallmark of D’Emilio’s work was that he […]
Notches Back to School Special: Introducing Students to the History of Sexuality
Gillian Frank Learning new names, establishing expectations, reviewing the syllabus, and exciting students about course materials are among the many challenges professors face on the first day of class. Those who teach history of sexuality classes face additional hurdles. Many students carry with them fundamental assumptions about sexuality. Often, they think of sexuality as […]
"Coming Out" in the Classroom: When the Personal is Pedagogical
Justin Bengry I’ve never come out to my students. I’ve never stood at the front of a classroom and told my students that I’m gay, and I’ve never told them witty anecdotes about my husband. That isn’t to say that I’m not completely out both professionally and personally (as google […]
(Sexual) Labour Day
Julia Laite I’ve often said that researching prostitution makes me more of a labour historian than a historian of sexuality. Despite having typically been lumped into the same categories as homosexuality and other perceived sexual deviances, women who sold sex in the past connected their actions not to their sexuality but to […]
Male Order: Tom of Finland and the Queer Iconography of Postage Stamps
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 […]
Beards, Real Men, and Poseurs: male sexuality and fashion since around 1900
Julia Laite A recent post by regular blogger Nikki Daniels (‘An open letter to bearded hipsters’) that has made the usual rounds of facebook and twitter has got me thinking about how male fashion has long been central to the way we define what it means to be a ‘real’ man. The blogger wrote about […]