It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
Mosquitos and Mothers: The Zika Virus and Real Talk on Birth Control
Mosquitos carrying the Zika virus in Latin America are wreaking havoc in people’s lives into the next generation. It’s only […]
Nursing Clio’s Best of 2015!
With acknowledgments to our friends at Tropics of Meta who thought of the idea first, here are Nursing Clio’s “best […]
New York, 60 Years Later: Sexual Health and Coming of Age in The Bell Jar and Netflix’s Master of None
Master of None, the new Netflix TV show created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang (best known for their work […]
Toxics in our Living Rooms
The comfortable chair that I just bought and sit in for hours each day is giving me a sore throat […]
A Doctor, a Patient, a Rash, and Google
Don’t you hate it when you can’t get your doctor to agree with your own assessment of your symptoms? Never […]
Love, Sex, and Pink Viagra
Ever heard of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD)? It’s a new “disease” distressing tens of thousands of (presumably straight) women. […]
Vagina Dialogues
By Elizabeth Reis
Students at Mt. Holyoke College are protesting the annual performance of Eve Ensler’s feminist classic, The Vagina Monologues. Their gripe with the play is that by focusing on vaginas, the play perpetuates “vagina essentialism,” suggesting that ALL women have vaginas and that ALL people with vaginas are women. Transgender and intersex people have taught us that this seemingly simple “truth” is actually not true. There are women who have penises and there are men who have vaginas. Not to mention women born without vaginas! Hence, these Mt. Holyoke critics imply, the play contributes to the erasure of difference by presenting a “narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” and shouldn’t be produced on college campuses.
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.
Yes Virginia, Feminism Left Christmas Alone
By Cheryl Lemus
As I write this blog post, I am recovering from an intense Thanksgiving weekend. Over the course of four days, I cooked, attended a Doctor Who convention, put up the rest of our Christmas decorations, and shopped. I am not ashamed to admit that as of 11:59 p.m. on Halloween, I hit the Christmas station on Pandora. Although I usually wait until Thanksgiving to decorate the tree, I actually put it up a week early this year. And this was not the first time I was in a store very early on Thanksgiving because there was a deal that I could not pass up. I am a liberal feminist, and yes, I am one of those people who loves most everything about the holiday. I cook, I shop, I share past traditions, and damn it, my tree looks awesome. This feminist loves Christmas. Kirk Cameron would be proud.