In 1605, a woman named Elizabeth Brian testified before the courtroom of London’s Bridewell Hospital that the matron of the prison “gave her a drink in a pewter pot which was warm, and she thinks that destroyed the child within her” (BCB 5, f.41). Four or five days before Elizabeth drank from the matron’s pot,…
Category: Gender and Sexuality
Trans Futures: Speculative Fiction as Gender Liberation
Glen Kalliope Rodman // “You are certain he’s not a man?” – A.I.: Artificial Intelligence As a young person, my gender deviance was insuppressible and a source of perpetual friction with my teachers and peers. One entry from my childhood journal reads: “My art teacher told me I look like some actress from The Devil…
Gay Men and Lesbians, Alcohol Addiction, and the 1970s
John A. Carranza // In 2018, I wrote a piece on Oliver Sipple, the gay man who foiled an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford. In the aftermath of that attempt, Sipple’s life, including his sexuality, became public. In the years since he stopped the assassination his drinking had increased, which exacerbated some of the…
Thoughts on the Material Self
Dr. Brian J. Troth // February 2022. Heavy rain has drenched France’s capital; strong winds force the rain sideways and send the covid-testing tents tumbling down the road. In the Café Beaubourg, psychiatrist Dr. Christophe Fauré is working on his next book. Two months prior, I had just finished reading his first fiction, Mourir n’est…
“As if that ever works”: Herbal Abortifacients in “Bridgerton”
Julia Dauer // In the first season of Neflix’s period fantasy Bridgerton, Marina Thompson enters the kitchen of the wealthy house in which she is temporarily living, rummages among the jars shelved along the far wall, and brews herself an herbal tea. This scene memorably depicts an attempted herbal abortion, and Marina’s subsequent arc includes…
A Most Health-Giving Flood: Spatial Promiscuity in E M Forster’s A Passage to India
Bassam Sidiki // E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) may be one of the most important novels chronicling the spatial logics of segregation during the zenith of the British Raj. However, critical work on colonial space in the novel often ignores the centrality of health and disease in the narrative and how they…
Covering Up
Dr. Brian J. Troth // The Latin crudus has two meanings it bequeaths upon modern English. That which is crude can either be seen as that which is natural or that which is lacking taste. Humans have a natural state, but that state is ephemeral. As soon as the child exits the womb, it is…
Entering the Mystery: The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness
Emily Waples // Emily Dickinson, we know, did not title her poems. But when Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson set out to publish their first edition of Dickinson’s work in 1890, four years after her death, they took this liberty. What contemporary readers of R.W. Franklin’s edition may now know as poem #760,…
Bell v Tavistock and The Question of Informed Consent
Mia Florin-Sefton // On December 1st 2020, three High court judges in the UK effectively ruled that trans persons under the age of 18 will likely need a court order in order to gain access to puberty blockers in England and Wales. This highly publicized judgement was the result of a legal complaint first lodged…
The New Normal: Dating During COVID-19
Dr. Brian J. Troth // The trouble with normal is that so very few people are. I’m referencing Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal, in which the author shows that our notion of ‘normal’ is the result of society accumulating data. Once we knew how many people fit into a category, the majority category became…