“I would say it’s just a pinch, but that’s not true. You’ll feel a prick when I insert the needle, and then a burning sensation. It’ll last for about thirty seconds and it will be unpleasant, but then it’ll be over.” I am not used to having my pain acknowledged in clinical settings when it…
Category: Gender and Sexuality
“A Hallowed Institution”: The Bordel Militaire de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels) and the Making of Military Prostitution in France Following World War One
Reflecting on the French system of military prostitution known as Bordels Militaires de Campagne (BMC, Mobile Field Brothels) during the First World War, Dr. Léon Bizard wrote in his memoirs (1925): It was a mêlée, a hard, dangerous, and disgusting business. Fifty, sixty, up to a hundred men of all colors and races to relieve…
Fertility and Consent in Machiavelli’s Writing
Today Machiavelli is known almost exclusively as a political thinker, but to his contemporaries he was also an expert on herbs and poisons. Though his medicinal writings no longer exist, Machiavelli is cited twice in 16th-century manuals as an expert on spider poison. Likely, he would have been extremely familiar with the early modern…
Stunning and Stirring: A Theory on the Symbolic of Spirit Ectoplasm in the Early 20th Century
The purpose of this article is to interweave the history of spiritualist phenomena and that of sexuality in the 19th century, in order to demonstrate that a mixture of fascination and desire may have played a significant role in the observations made by the esteemed scientists who studied the case of “ectoplasmic mediums”.
Criminalizing Pregnancy before Dobbs: The Case of Elizabeth Brian at Bridewell Hospital
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,…
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…