Palgrave Handbook (original) (raw)

Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749-1833): An extract from Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres (Discourse on women's physical and moral education) (1790)

Women in the History of Science. A sourcebook. Edited by Hannah Wills, Sadie Harrison, Erika Jones, Farrah Lawrence-Mackey and Rebecca Martin. , 2023

This text proposes to use an eighteenth-century work to teach from a historical point of view the processes by which bodies are gendered. The source chosen for this is an extract from the introduction to the first part of a pedagogic work by the Spanish writer Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833), the Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres (Discourse on women’s physical and moral education), published in Madrid in 1790. The suggestions to work in class with this extract underline the making of the gendered, performative body and women's responses to it.

HST 312 History of Women in Science and Medicine - Supplemental Readings for Case Studies 2008

Some years ago, I decided that instead of having the students do research reports at random, I would give them "directed" research projects that would allow them to dig into a topic that intrigued them, but do so with some guidance so as not to get lost in a swamp of unfamiliar bibliography. After the opening weeks of the course, where I give them structured lectures surveying the general history of women and gender in the western scientific/medical tradition, we then do five CASE STUDIES. The student group who is in charge of each case study meets with me to discuss a research/teaching plan; they do extra directed readings (LISTED ON THIS 'SUPPLEMENTAL READINGS' LIST); they plan amongst themselves how they will organize their presentations; and then they both present their findings to the class and do some kind of "assessment exercise" to gauge their classmates comprehension.

PROSTITUTION, IDENTITY AND THE NEO-VICTORIAN: SARAH WATERS’S TIPPING THE VELVET

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 2016

Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) is set in the last decades of the nineteenth century and its two lesbian protagonists are given voice as the marginalised and “the other.” Judith Butler’s notion of gender performance is taken to its extremes in a story where male prostitution is exerted by a lesbian woman who behaves and dresses like a man. Therefore, drawing from Butler’s theories on gender performance and Elisabeth Grosz’s idea about bodily inscriptions, this article will address Victorian and contemporary discourses connected with the notions of identity and agency as the result of sexual violence and gender abuse.

Women and Science

Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO): Renaissance and Reformation, 2012

"My G-spot is not a myth!: Unpacking the (controversial) vaginal orgasm debate in recent medical journals"

Feminist Spaces, 2017

Abstract: Some medical researchers say the G-spot does exist, but many insist it does not. The question as to its valid existence is being hotly debated in recent medical journals. This is no surprise, since the clitoris was marginalized in modern medical documents until 1971 when the Boston Women’s Collective finally took it upon themselves to produce new knowledges about women’s orgasms with self-examination as a method. In a scientific search for the “true” G-spot, medical researchers use approaches that inadvertently obscure the complexity and variability of sexual pleasure. In addition, many of their findings are steeped in the cultural baggage that prioritizes the Victorian ideal of feminine sexuality. This paper argues that self-examination and testimony (feminist approaches to knowledge building) are an effective way to push back against “epistemologies of ignorance” about sexual pleasure. It is organized in three parts: part one is a short genealogy of 20th century literature on the G-spot and the clitoris; part two is an analysis of three recently published medical studies, all of which seek to definitively prove or disprove the G-spot; and part three discusses the problem that the search for Objective Truth can impose on research subjects, particularly subjects who have historically been excluded from practicing medicine.