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…
Category: Gender and Sexuality
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…
Margaret Sanger is Not the Problem
Jessica M Kirwan // This past summer, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum after the death of George Floyd, organizations across the United States and elsewhere closely examined their own histories of racism and racist membership. Coming to terms with its haunting past, Planned Parenthood decided to distance itself from its founder, Margaret…
Painted Veils, Distracted Hearts: Reading the Cuckolded Physician in Literature
Bassam Sidiki // The first chapter of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is entitled “The Perforated Sheet.” Aadam Aziz, a physician in the Kashmir valley in 1915, is summoned by the wealthy local landowner to see his daughter Naseem, who seems to be suffering from a stomachache. When Dr. Aziz steps into the young woman’s…
Moving ‘Beyond the Bikini’: Exposing the Logics of Pinkwashed Healthcare
Elena Kalodner-Martin // Introduction As of 2017, the leading causes of death for women are heart diseases, lung cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and Alzheimer’s (Center for Disease Control and Prevention). However, public discourse surrounding women’s health and illness often focuses on other conditions, such as breast, ovarian, and cervical cancers, polycystic ovarian syndrome, premenstrual…
Utera-Net as a Means to Revolt
Swati Joshi // The word ornament brings to mind the image of an entity that is stereotypically designated for “embellishment” (Rosenbauer 1947, 222). While analyzing ornaments as beautifying agents, we recall the inseparability of beauty and gaze, and that the object of beauty (whether human or non-human) surrenders to the gaze of the observer. The…
T in the Time of Coronavirus
Diana Rose Newby // Why has COVID-19 killed more men than women? As the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues its global spread, infection patterns and fatality rates have prompted this question both among medical experts and in the popular media. As of late April, data confirmed this disparity in multiple regions of the world: in China,…
Literature After the Era of Roe v. Wade
Bojan Srbinovski // “The right of privacy,” writes Justice Harry Blackmun in the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, “whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action…or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to…
