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JOANNA BOURKE

Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.


Monogamy: A History
Why is monogamy such a big deal? What can a history of fidelity and infidelity reveal about the changing rights, duties, and social...
Feb 5, 202418 min read
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Pornography: A History
Pornography is divisive. It is guaranteed to incite heated debates between people inhabiting different subject positions based on...
Feb 5, 202420 min read
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Sexual Perversion: A History
What do we mean when we talk about the ‘perversions’? Who gets to decide what is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’? The concept of ‘perversion’ is...
Feb 5, 202420 min read
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Sexual Pleasure: A History
Throughout human history, sexual danger has regulated social lives and subjectivities. From the ‘yellow press’ of the late nineteenth...
Feb 5, 202419 min read
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Self-Defence for Women: A History
In the 1870s, middle-class women carried ‘dagger-fans’ when alone in public places; in the early 1900s, they hosted ‘jujitsu parties’ for...
Feb 5, 20244 min read
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bell hooks (on her death): Inspirations Series
bell hooks has been an enduring presence in my life. I first read her 1981 classic Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism as an...
Jan 10, 20241 min read
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Breast Cancer: A History
Suddenly feeling a lump in one’s breast is terrifying, yet it is an experience suffered by one in every eight women in Britain and...
Jan 7, 20246 min read
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Digital Ways of Dying
A fortnight ago, a friend sent me a light-hearted reminder that it was her birthday in a few days. She does this every year. The problem...
Jan 3, 20249 min read
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Headache: A History
In 1964, author and critic Susan Sontag published a little-known short story entitled ‘Man with a Pain’. It is an eloquent reflection not...
Jan 3, 20247 min read
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