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JOANNA BOURKE

Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.


The Möbius Strip & Negative Zoélogy: Celebrating Difference
A möbius strip: 'Which side of the strip are the ants walking on?'. (A 1963 poster of a woodcut by M. C. Escher) The concept ‘the human’...
Jan 308 min read
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Queer Activism, Citizenship, and the Age of Consent
Why aren’t gay, lesbian, trans, and queer people full citizens in law? This question enraged gay activists in 1990s Britain. The HIV/AIDS...
Nov 4, 20242 min read
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Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence
The events I have enjoyed most in connection with the SHaME project were our two Shameless! Festivals of Activism Against Sexual...
Apr 24, 20241 min read
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SHaME: Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters
For five and a half years, I have been privileged to work with the SHaME team at Birkbeck. It has been the most intellectually rewarding...
Apr 24, 20241 min read
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Audre Lorde: Inspirations Series
Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the...
Mar 17, 20246 min read
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Clare Shaw's Incredible Poems in 'Towards A General Theory of Love'
Clare Shaw, Towards a General Theory of Love (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022) Clare Shaw’s new, prize-winning poetry collection is...
Mar 7, 20245 min read
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‘It Makes My Head Jump’: Shell-Shock, Psychology, and War 1914-1945
On the 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He...
Feb 11, 202426 min read
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The Killing Frenzy: Wartime Narratives of Enemy Action
William Manchester was a scared young American, flung down on the island of Okinawa during the Second World War and expected to act with...
Feb 11, 202419 min read
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The Strange Case of George Dedlow: Mutilation, Military Surgery, and Weir Mitchell
On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...
Feb 11, 20247 min read
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History, Mental Health, and Psychiatry: 5 Shifts
Robairt Clough was a long-term patient at Holywell Psychiatric Hospital in Antrim (Northern Ireland). In the Christmas 1972 edition of...
Feb 11, 202415 min read
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‘Rachel Comforted’: Spiritualism and the Reconstruction of the Body after Death
Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five...
Feb 10, 202418 min read
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Eric Hobsbawm (with a nod to poetic genius Adrienne Rich!)
What do we get when we lend our ears to Eric Hobsbawm? Passion. Energy. Exhilarating sweeps of time; giddy swoops into political darkness...
Feb 10, 20246 min read
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Sleep: A History
Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...
Feb 10, 20248 min read
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The Humanities: La Fontaine's Cat, Kafka's Ape, and the Human
What does it mean to be human? We inhabit a world that is commonly, and lazily, dubbed ‘post-human’. Indeed, in recent decades, an anti...
Feb 6, 202413 min read
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Rape (a very very short history)
We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant...
Feb 6, 20244 min read
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Human Rights: Are They Universal?
God, the source of natural law is dead: long live international law, with its hallowed spectre, human rights. State-sponsored terror,...
Feb 6, 202412 min read
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World War One: The Home Front
Fear, grief, sorrow: these are the overriding emotions of war. For men, women, and children confined to the home front between 1914 and...
Feb 6, 20248 min read
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Mastectomy, Fear, the Body: A History
In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...
Feb 6, 20247 min read
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Cruelty: Pain, War, Sexual Abuse
The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual...
Feb 6, 202421 min read
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Helena Kennedy: Inspirations Series
Kennedy’s great passion is for law. She was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1972. At the age of only 24 years, just out of pupillage,...
Feb 6, 20245 min read
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