My university students are very good at behaving. They say “thank you, Heather,” after every class, write emails with streamlined professionalism, and (almost) always follow instructions. This quarter in my “Medicine in British Popular Culture” seminar course, we’ve committed to loosening that grip on affective constraint. We start class with silly ice-breakers, we welcome deep…
Category: Gender and Sexuality
“Venereal Peril”: ‘Controlled’ Prostitution and French Regulationism After 1945
Penicillin and the French regulationist system The advent of penicillin in the 1930s marked a significant breakthrough that revolutionized the therapeutic landscape for diverse bacterial infections, including those causing venereal diseases (Brandt, Jones 1999). The use of penicillin during World War Two led to a decline in the incidence of syphilis and allowed for more…
Sex Data in Research: A Sex Contextualist Suggestion
Introduction Health research on trans*[1] and intersex populations prompts essential questions about how researchers use sex as a biological variable. According to the NIH policy, “NIH expects that sex as a biological variable will be factored into research designs, analyses, and reporting in vertebrate animal and human studies” (“NIH Policy”). The NIH policy was developed…
The Threat of a Bad Gay Past: Queer Temporalities in The Miseducation of Cameron Post
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018) tells the story of Cameron (Chloe Grace Moretz), a teenage girl sent to a Christian conversion therapy boarding school after her boyfriend discovers her with another girl on prom night. Cameron’s devout aunt panics after the revelation and sends her to God’s Promise to be cured of…
Access Denied: Health and Justice Under Siege
Access Denied: Health and Justice Under Siege Authors: Khosro Kalbasi Isfahani and Tiffany D. Creegan Miller Khosro Kalbasi Isfahani is an Iranian journalist, activist, and researcher. Currently, Isfahani writes for BBC Monitoring, the Atlantic Council, and ARTICLE 19, focusing especially on health and human rights violations. His work includes articles on Iran’s violence against protestors,…
Let’s Talk About Sex: ‘90s Nostalgia, Hip-Hop, and Creating a Safe Space in Clinical Care
A few weeks ago, I cared for a young woman who came in to get an IUD check and be screened for sexually transmitted infections. She sat on the exam table, squeezing the vinyl covering between her fingers and palms, crossing her legs at the ankles. Her lashes were long and fake, curled up like…
Representations and Discourses of Vietnamese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards, Part II
Clothing in Postcards of Algerian and Moroccan Women In many ways, garments were a marker of disparity between Vietnamese and North African colonial portraiture. In Algeria and Morocco, postcards were often organized around the veiled—or rather, unveiled—woman, a theme central to Orientalist art and photography. Colonialist photographers, such as Jean Geiser, Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst…
The Wateriness of Women: Humoral Underpinnings of Ophelia, Shalott & L’Inconnue
“But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself” (Hamlet, 5.1.15.)
Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I
In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…
“To Break into Pieces” – Puncturing and Preserving the Feminine Self in Leila Chatti’s Deluge (2020)
“To Break into Pieces” – Puncturing and Preserving the Feminine Self in Leila Chatti’s Deluge (2020) The medical root “-rrhagia” at the end of a term signifies an urgent and abnormal rupture accompanied by a shocking burst of liquid, as in hemorrhage (blood loss from a damaged vessel), menorrhagia (excessive menstrual bleeding), or metrorrhagia…