Author Archives: Jennifer Ellen Grove

The Cause from Dreadnought SouthWest

Our project director Jana Funke took part in a Post-Show Panel of a performance of The Cause, a play about the history of women’s suffrage, from Dreadnought SouthWest. The panel also featured Julia Neville (Historian) and Playwright Natalie McGrath. Chaired by Josie Sutcliffe.

To our wonderful panel of phenomenal women & to the audience who stayed to hear them speak: @Rosball @DrJanaFunke @jfneville1 – Thank you! Wonderfu to learn more about your work. Let’s continue the conversation. pic.twitter.com/THFXXjvXoR

— DreadnoughtSW (@DreadnoughtSW) May 23, 2018

Queerer Modernism

Jana Funke, our project director, delivered the keynote address at Queer Modernism(s) II: Intersectional Identities in April 2018 on ‘Queerer Modernism’. According to the conference report Jana “demonstrated how contemporary focus on inversion obscured the greater variety in discourse on sexuality. Funke showed how Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West used Marie Stope’s sexology to understand their failure to achieve sexual pleasure in their marriage, showing the possibilities of queer identification beyond lesbian experience. Funke invited her listeners to move beyond the closed circuit of identitarian labels, and, in doing so, ‘queer’ queer studies”.

You, Dear Doctor, Are My Only Rescue!

In March 2018 the Rethinking Sexology team hosted an event dedicated to the history of sexuality and sexual science in Poland. Continue reading →

Occupy The Airwaves 2018

In 2018 our project director Jana Funke appeared as part of Dreadnought Southwest’s Occupy The Airwaves with Phonic FM On International Women’s Day 2018.

Workshop: ‘Biological Discourses: Science, Sexuality, and the Novel around 1900’

This was a multi-disciplinary workshop held in February 2018.

Dr Charlotte Woodford (Cambridge) spoke on “Sexology and women’s sexual emancipation: Lou Andreas-Salome’s theories of female sexuality and her novella ‘Deviations’ (1898) as literary case study”

Dr Godela Weiss-Sussex (Cambridge) gave a paper on “Monism, Eugenics, and (the Limits of) Female Agency: Grete Meisel-Hess’s Novel Die Intellektuellen [The Intellectuals] (1911).”

This seminar was hosted by the University of Exeter’s Centre for Medical History and the Rethinking Sexology project, and was part of the Medical History and Humanities seminar series (details of which can be found here).

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Expressing Sex: An Informal Workshop for Young People (16-25)

How did people in the past express their sexuality and gender? What can a photograph from the nineteenth century, scientific data from the 1900s, a statue from the ancient world, or a novel written by someone in the 1920s tell us about sexuality and gender in the past? How did people living decades and centuries ago make sense of their own “identities”? How do people today think and speak about sexuality and gender, and how might looking to history help us to express ourselves now? Continue reading →

Valentines day on BBC Radio

On Valentines day 2018 our project member Sarah Jones appeared on BBC Radio Devon to talk about what the Victorians think about flirting, romance and sex. Read more here.

The Anthill podcast

Our project directors appeared on an episode of The Anthill, a podcast from The Conversation, to discuss the Rethinking Sexology project.

“The scientists who shattered the repressed view of sex and brought us closer to our liberated selves”

Our project director, Professor Kate Fisher spoke at Sexology and ideology in the age of institutionalization (1960-2000), Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des religions et de la laïcité (CIERL), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), March 2018. Her paper was titled: ‘“The scientists who shattered the repressed view of sex and brought us closer to our liberated selves” (Naomi Joseph, reviewing Wellcome Collection, Institute of Sexology) Early Sexology in Twentieth Century Culture’.

Workshop: Exploring the history of modern sex advice

This workshop, run as a joint endeavour between the Rethinking Sexology project and Exeter’s Sexual Knowledge Unit, explores the history of sex advice in the modern world. It features papers from Dr Ben Mechen (UCL), Dr Caroline Rusterholz (Birkbeck), and Linnea Tillema (QMUL/Uppsala).

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