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Monday 16 May 2011

Catching up on journal literature II


Hera Cook, 'Sex and the Experts. Medicalisation as a Two Way Process, Britain 1920-1950' chapter in Usborne, Cornelie/Blécourt, Willem de (eds) Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine. Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe (2003): tends to concur with my own views that these manuals were performing a work of enlightenment (not just introducing a new oppressive hegemony), and does useful analysis of various manuals along axes of male/female, medical/non-medical writers.
Pauline Phipps, 'Faith, Desire and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard's Atonement for Passion', Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009), pp. 265-286: an analysis of the first mistress of Westfield College University of London, and explores same-sex desires between women, the role of religion, and the fact that these relationships could have elements of abuse, at least on the emotional level (I rather wish I'd read this before sending off my Berks paper, since there seemed to me to be more than a little of Clemence Dane's Clare Hartill in Maynard).
Deborah Cohler, 'Sapphism and Sedition. Producing Female Homosexuality in Great War Britain', Journal of the History of Sexuality 16 (2007), p. 68-94: covering similar ground to her Citizen, Invert, Queer Looking at the relative fluidity and indeterminacy (or just confusion) around female same-sex desire towards the end of the Great War and the way discourses around nationalism and militarism played into it - looking at Allatini's Despised and Rejected and the Maud Allan case.
Richard Philips, 'Heterogeneous Imperialism and the Regulation of Sexuality in British West Africa',  Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005), pp 291-315: why did quite a lot of parts of the Empire in the C19th not have the CD Acts or anything along those lines? Uses Sierra Leone as a case-study. Other modes of sexual regulation going on. Specific local situtations and contingency. Flexibility of imperialism - response to contexts. Notes that in some places there was popular support for regulation (cf Tuck on Uganda). Attitudes towards 'the African'.
Brian Lewis, 'The Queer Life and Afterlife of Roger Casement' Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005), pp. 363-383: about the ways in which Casement's homosexuality has been used, considered as a libellous product of forgery, etc. The problematic and contradictory elements of his sexuality - not 'a gay saint'. Puzzlement of contemporaries about the disjunction between his humanitarianism and what was seen as an appalling revelation.
Lisa Z Sigel, 'Name Your Pleasure: the Transformation of Sexual Language in Nineteenth Century British Pornography', Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000), pp. 395-419: how the elaborate and celebratory, even quite baroque, descriptions of C18th erotica, give way to the use of 'filthy' obscene language. Which had previously been 'vulgar' but not smutty and arousing in the way it becomes in Victorian pornography. Sigel points out that most Victporn was for a middle-class audience and 'filth' had lots of class connotations, and that there is increasing association of sex & dirt, plus misogyny. Breaching of taboos. The 'emptying out' of erotic writing as suggested by Dorelies Kraak in the Sexual Cultures book.

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