Former president Donald Trump publicly mocked and disparaged disabled people, weakened the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and cut the payroll tax to make Social Security Disability Income run out by 2022. Writing for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg interpreted that “Trump is deeply anxious about dying or… Read more →
Category: Clio Reads
Review of To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS by Dan Royles
As we approach the eleventh month of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death rates for Black, Indigenous, and people of color are disproportionately high and rising daily. The national response to the virus echoes the long-term HIV/AIDS pandemic that continues today to rattle the Black world. Dan Royle’s monumental new book, To Make the Wounded Whole:… Read more →
Upholding “First, Do No Harm”: A Review of Sarah B. Rodriguez’s The Love Surgeon
James Burt, an OB/GYN in Dayton, Ohio, spent years developing and perfecting his “love surgery.” He designed it to increase men’s pleasure during sex by “fixing” women’s anatomies so they would get better clitoral stimulation during missionary postion sex. The procedure involved radically altering womens’ genitalia: making the vaginal opening smaller, moving the vaginal opening… Read more →
Bearing the Capitalist Economy: A Review of Alexandra J. Finley’s An Intimate Economy
The historiography of women’s lives under and role in slavery and the slave trade has changed substantially in the recent years with the publication of a number of award-winning books. Scholars such as Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Jessica Marie Johnson, Ariela J. Gross, and Marisa Fuentes have reshaped our understanding of the intersection of gender, race,… Read more →
What About Men’s Reproductive Health?
In her latest book, GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health, sociologist Rene Almeling asks why all the public health messages about healthy childbearing seem to be aimed at women. What about the research that shows that men’s health is relevant to the condition of their sperm, and can profoundly affect the health of… Read more →
Defining Normal Genitalia: A Review of Camille Nurka’s Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery
Everything, of course, has a history, and in her book, Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery: Deviance, Desire and the Pursuit of Perfection, Camille Nurka seeks to find the historical path leading up to what have been popularly (and not entirely accurately) called “designer vaginas.” These surgeries are often performed, and requested, with the intention of surgically… Read more →
Motherhood, Undone: A Review of Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women by Lyz Lenz
One evening in early April, after yet another day of sending my toddler daughter to “Frozen school” while I attempted to work from home, I found myself in the woodshed, chucking pieces of firewood into the wall. I had wandered through to put the dogs out and when a few pieces fell dangerously close to… Read more →
The Collective Power of Our Abortion Stories
“I had an abortion in 1999.” So begins Annie Finch’s important new anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, about the representation of abortion across literary genres. After her abortion, Finch searched to find depictions of the procedure in literature to make sense of her experience and was surprised to learn that no major collection existed…. Read more →
Past Practices: A Review of Ruth MacKay’s Life in a Time of Pestilence: The Great Castilian Plague of 1596–1601
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, a number of historians of medicine and other scholars have written and given interviews about past public health crises. E. Thomas Ewing’s look at how newspapers focused on kissing during the 1918 influenza outbreak suggested that the emphasis on kissing via handkerchief 100 years ago signaled potentially troubling questions for… Read more →
Accessibility in America Past and Present
Bess Williamson’s Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design is a thought-provoking and edifying look at the shifting culture around disability and the design of our built environment in the United States from post-World War II to the present. I was interested to read the book both because I have a longstanding scholarly interest… Read more →