Gillian Frank, "Pricks in Public: A Microhistory"
”In a high-profile instance of work-from-home gone horribly wrong, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was recently suspended from his gigs at the New Yorker and CNN, after masturbating during a work Zoom meeting in front of a number of his coworkers. One historian, Jonathan Zimmerman, even characterized the widespread condemnation of Toobin as rooted in Americans’ longstanding prudishness about masturbation. But while there is a history at play here, it’s not that of Americans’ uneasy relationship with masturbation. It’s the history of men publicly “sharing” their private parts in offices and on the street. It is also a story of white men’s power to sexualize and control workplaces and public space through these same actions.”
Robert Barnes, "Barrett’s Evasiveness Alarms LGBTQ Advocates Fearful Supreme Court May Roll Back Protections"
”Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett dodged questions on the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which granted same-sex couples the right to marry.”
Emma Bubola, “Bill Offering L.G.B.T. Protections in Italy Spurs Rallies on Both Sides"
”Supporters frame the measure as a long-overdue means to provide basic human rights. Opponents depict it as an overreaching step that would suppress opinion.”
Julie Moreau, “Anti-LGBTQ Attack Ads Ramp up Ahead of Election Day"
”Anti-LGBT political ads have ramped up as election day has neared. A number of attack ads this election cycle have also targeted transgender candidates and candidates that support policies that advance transgender rights.”
Michael K. Lavers, "Activists in Swing States Drive LGBTQ Voter Mobilization Efforts"
”Advocacy groups in battleground states from Michigan to Florida, have pulled out all the stops in their efforts to encourage members of the LGBTQ community to vote.”
Elisabetta Povoledo, “Vatican Clarifies Pope Francis’s Comments on Same-Sex Unions"
”The Vatican has confirmed the pope’s remarks on gay couples deserving civil protections as it sent an explanatory note to bishops underlining that Francis’s comments did not mark a change in church doctrine. The pope’s remarks made headlines last month after they appeared in the documentary “Francesco,” at its Oct. 21 premiere at the Rome Film Festival. In the documentary, he reiterated his view that gay people are “children of God,” and said: “What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered.”
Paul Elie, "Pope Francis Supports Same-Sex Civil Unions, but the Church Must Do More"
”When it comes to sexuality, the Church’s account of the human person is as superannuated as trickle-down economics and coal-burning power plants.”
Article Spotlight
Kirsten Leng, ‘Fumerism as Queer Feminist Activism: Humour and Rage in the Lesbian Avengers’ Visibility Politics’, Gender & History, Vol.32 No.1 March 2020, p. 108–130. doi:10.1111/1468-0424.12450
This article examines the role of humour within the late twentieth‐century lesbian feminist direct action group, the Lesbian Avengers. Using stand‐up comedian and writer Kate Clinton's neologism ‘fumerism’, it explores how the Avengers’ actions mixed humour with an angry edge to protest issues such as sexual violence and dabbled in the grotesque in order to target misogyny. This article argues that ‘fumer’ served the Avengers as a creative, cathartic and provocative means of raising awareness of lesbian issues, broaching demands and making (political) lesbians visible. This article situates the Avengers’ tactics within an era of resurgent conservatism and direct‐action politics, and asserts that they belong to a larger, longer history of feminist humour only now gaining scholarly attention.
Episode Spotlight
Decades before the #MeToo movement, flight attendants navigated a workplace in which their employers required them to stay thin, remain unmarried, and squeeze into revealing clothing every day. In the early 1970s, flight attendants organized one of the first campaigns against workplace sexual harassment, assault, and sexual discrimination.
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Books
Upcoming Events
Contagions of Empire: A Conversation With Professor Khary Polk, 8 November 2020
"An author discussion with Professor Khary Polk about his recently published book, Contagions of Empire.
Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, June 2020) examines how the movement of Black soldiers and nurses around the world in the early-to-mid twentieth century challenged U.S. military ideals of race, nation, and honor.”
Rachel Hope Cleves in Conversation with Alexis Coe, 17 November 2020
”Rachel Hope Cleves, author of Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality, in conversation with Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.
Unspeakable is the clear-eyed biography of Norman Douglas, a once beloved, now largely forgotten author—and an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves’s careful study of Douglas’s life opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment—until they didn’t.”
Race, Sex, and Disease in the Early Caribbean: Yaws and Syphillis, UCL Institute of the Americas, 18 November 2020
”Dr Katherine Paugh of Oxford University will discuss the story of syphilis in the early Caribbean, focusing on how Britons and West Africans who were caught up in the Atlantic slave trade and new world slavery understood syphilis. ”
