Every so often, a book comes out that arrives as both an answer to a question and an answer to a prayer. For me, Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is emphatically both. My scholarly superpower, and an annoying one it is too, is finding the holes in the… Read more →
Hanne Blank
Hanne Blank
Contributor
She Had Guts: Shirley Chisholm
The most important thing to know about the late Representative Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) is not that she was a Black woman who made a serious bid to become the Democratic party nominee for President in 1972. The most important thing to know about Shirley Chisholm is that she was a Black woman who made a… Read more →
But It’s Vintage Lifestyle Change: Surveying the History of American Orthorexia with the Whole30
Before I go any further, let me make one thing perfectly clear: this article is about a diet. Yes, I went on that diet and followed it to the letter. No, you’re not going to find out whether I lost weight. This is partly because I don’t know, since I don’t believe a numerical representation… Read more →
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 genitals, external or internal or both, a zone of persistent, intransigent pain. Yet the names physicians have given these conditions are indicative of little more than their primary symptoms: “vulvodynia,” perhaps the most common diagnosis,… Read more →
A Pot of Herbs, A Plastic Sheet, and Thou: A Historian Goes for a “V-Steam”
The first time I walked into the women’s area of my local Korean spa a few years back, my nose and my medical-history Spidey Sense both twitched. The unmistakable herbal scents of mugwort and yarrow were in the air, pleasant but almost strong enough to make me cough. Clearly there was some sort of medicinal… Read more →