Cathy Brennan looks at the medical tradition of categorising trans women based on sexuality and its continuing power in transphobic politics.
Category: Culture
How the Tignon Laws backfired
Maxine Harrison remembers an oppressive law that sparked a new wave of independent self-expression.
A political history of ‘Afro Blue’
Hugh Morris describes how a jazz track made the leap from song to symbol.
Fanfiction: an alternative pornographic history
Kalli Dockrill asks where fanfiction - a site of sexual exploration in the twenty-first century, particularly for women - fits into a male-dominated history of erotica.
The rise, fall, and rise again of women’s football
Rebecca Johnson writes about women's football in its first heyday, and the sustained campaign that barred women from the pitch for forty years.
The vagina missing from space
Jessica Thomson writes on the anatomic shortcomings of 1973's Pioneer Plaque, and the intergalactic implications of our censorship of human bodies.
Yugoslavia’s Roma women
Maisie Revel examines the position of one of history's most marginalised groups in the Socialist Republic between 1945 and 1992.
What is hidden: the myth of the haughty servant
Emily Sandercock examines the modern relevance of the threat posed by upstart servants to paranoid 18th- and 19th-century elites.
How comedy became resistance
Sophia Marshall writes on the historical relationship between laughter and political dissent.
The language of bushfires
Pepe Bingham-Hall discusses the relationship between language and land conservation in light of the mismanagement of Australia's fires.
