I have never known a person who was 100% content with everything about their body, 100% of the time. The […]
“Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Girls and Sex (But Really Need to Ask)”: Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
In American media and pop culture, there is a constant barrage of fear and panic about teens, especially girls, and […]
So Much To be Done: The Writings of Breast Cancer Activist Barbara Brenner
When Barbara Brenner was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993, friends recommended that she read Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. […]
Clio Reads: A Review of It Hurts Down There: The Bodily Imaginaries Of Female Genital Pain
“Female genital pain” is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of often miserable, frequently perplexing conditions that render women’s […]
Surviving While Black in America: A Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
One of the products of Americans’ growing consciousness around racism and the police killings of African Americans is the conversation […]
Clio Reads: Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment
By Carrie Adkins
Many Americans think of female circumcision and clitoridectomy as cultural or religious practices that have taken place primarily in other parts of the world — not as medical procedures performed by doctors in the United States for the past 150 years. And though scholars of gender, sex, and medicine have noted the significance of clitoral surgeries, we have been missing a historical monograph on the subject.[1] Sarah B. Rodriguez’s new book, Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment, fills this gap in the scholarship and, more importantly, explores the relationships between clitoral surgeries, social prescriptions for female behavior, and cultural approaches to sexuality and marriage. It’s an important book, and many Nursing Clio readers will find it fascinating.
Clio Reads: A Review of Feminism Unfinished
In Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements, historians Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry […]
Positively Negative: Love, Pregnancy, and Science’s Surprising Victory over HIV
By Lara Freidenfelds
What would you do if you desperately wanted to have a baby, and your spouse had HIV? In the mid-1990s, the introduction of highly-effective HIV drug regimens turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic condition. People with HIV and their life partners could begin to imagine creating families and living to see their children grow up. But it was not until 2014 that researchers and policy-makers approved a prophylactic regimen that effectively protects against HIV-transmission even without condom use. (It still is not officially condoned for family-building purposes, but some physicians are willing to prescribe it for that purpose.) For almost two decades, HIV-discordant couples faced a special kind of infertility: it was childlessness caused by the threat of illness, by fear, and by a traumatized, cautious public health and medical community that could not move beyond its initial message, that “only condoms prevent HIV transmission.”
A new e-book, Positively Negative: Love, Pregnancy, and Science’s Surprising Victory over HIV, takes us into the lives of two couples who lived this history.
