A few weeks before writing this blog, I was launching a book that I had recently published. A former PhD student of mine and someone I...

It is impossible not to be charmed by Athens. At night, bouzouki music wells up from dark basements; tables spill out of ouzeris, around...

To whom does a woman’s body belong? In mid-nineteenth century Britain, this question provoked impassioned debates between moralists,...

Is sex a ‘good thing’? Is celibacy dangerous? How can we understand the explosive violence of Incels, those young men (primarily) whose...

Why is monogamy such a big deal? What can a history of fidelity and infidelity reveal about the changing rights, duties, and social...

Pornography is divisive. It is guaranteed to incite heated debates between people inhabiting different subject positions based on...

What do we mean when we talk about the ‘perversions’? Who gets to decide what is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’? The concept of ‘perversion’ is...

Throughout human history, sexual danger has regulated social lives and subjectivities. From the ‘yellow press’ of the late nineteenth...

Walking into the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution (as it was then called) in the 1890s could be a dispiriting experience....

Sexual violence and abuse are ingrained into military cultures. Armed conflict not only radically lowers the threshold at which...

In the 1870s, middle-class women carried ‘dagger-fans’ when alone in public places; in the early 1900s, they hosted ‘jujitsu parties’ for...

In this blog, I reflect on the devastating conclusions of a report by the Defense Committee (25 July 2021) entitled ‘Protecting Those Who...

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...

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...

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...

In 1964, author and critic Susan Sontag published a little-known short story entitled ‘Man with a Pain’. It is an eloquent reflection not...

Review of Heather R. Hlavka and Sameena Mulla’s Bodies in Evidence. Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (New York:...