Episodios

  • Female Husbands, or People Have Always Transed Gender

    Female Husbands, or People Have Always Transed Gender
    Jun 22 2025
    Averill's Book, Love in the Lav Series, Episode #2 of 4. In 1746, Charles Hamilton, a doctor, married Mary Price in Wells, England. Hamilton was a traveling doctor, selling patent medicines and dubious medical advice, and had met Mary when staying in a rented room. After the wedding, Mary joined Charles in traveling and selling cures for a couple of months until suddenly, she decided she no longer wanted to be married – and to get out of the relationship, Mary went to the local court and reported that her husband Charles Hamilton was, in fact, a woman. The revelation that Hamilton was assigned female at birth but lived their life as a man enchanted the public, and, as much as something could in the 18th century, went viral. Hamilton’s story was then immortalized in a fictionalized story called The Female Husband. Thus, the concept of a “female husband,” or a person assigned female at birth but living as a man, including serving as a husband, entered into the consciousness of the Anglo-American world. The history of female husbands like Charles Hamilton and many others prove not only that queerness has always existed, but that gender itself has always has been messy, flexible, and contested. Bibliography Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    1 h y 1 m
  • Just Friends: The Ladies of Llangollen

    Just Friends: The Ladies of Llangollen
    Jun 8 2025
    Love in the Lav Series, Episode # 1 of 4. Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, colloquially known as the Ladies of Llangollen, lived together in North Wales for 51 years in a cottage that they renovated and designed to suit their tastes, on an estate where they built gravel footpaths wending through perfectly lush gardens planted with all manner of shrubs, flowers, fruit trees and bushes, and vegetables. They embraced the “rural retirement” so admired and extolled by eighteenth century philosophers, poets, and artists; and presented their domestic arrangement as the rare but mostly acceptable “romantic friendship” written about in novels and poems. The inscription on Sarah Ponsonby’s tomb is no accident. The Ladies of Llangollen were a queer couple who dedicated their lives to one another, and to the home they built and shared in North Wales - and this month we’re lifting up stories of queer and trans folks in history, beginning with these two reclusive (but bizarrely public) Irish women who eloped to Wales together. Bibliography Averill Earls, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-72, Temple University Press, 2025. Fiona Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism (Bucknell University Press, 2017) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    52 m
  • The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Medical Ethics & Race

    The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Medical Ethics & Race
    May 5 2025
    Disability Series, #4 of 4. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was an ethically problematic, to say the least, medical research project conducted in Alabama. Officially titled “The Effects of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” this government-sponsored research project was conducted by the United States Public Health Service in Macon County, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972. For four decades, researchers observed the progression of untreated syphilis in approximately 399 African American men without their informed consent. Many of the men thought they were being treated for “bad blood,” which had a variety of connotations. They were not aware that they were being actively blocked from receiving effective treatment, even after penicillin became the recognized standard of care for syphilis in the 1940s. Rather than viewing the study as an isolated event, we’ll see how the Tuskegee study fits into a broader framework of American medical and disability history and racial discrimination. Select Bibliography Jones, James H. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. (Simon and Schuster, 1993). Lederer, Susan. “Experimentation on Human Beings.” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 19, No. 5, Medicine and History (Sep., 2005), pp. 20-22. Reverby, Susan Mokotoff. Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Sharma, Alankaar. “Diseased Race, Racialized Disease: The Story of the Negro Project of American Social Hygiene Association Against the Backdrop of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.” Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 247-262. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    49 m
  • Cripping Contagion: A Long History of Epidemics as Mass-Disabling Events

    Cripping Contagion: A Long History of Epidemics as Mass-Disabling Events
    Apr 28 2025
    Disability Series. Episode #3 of 4. Since the advent of epidemiology (the study of infectious disease, its spread and prevention), humanists and scientists have been able to study mass-disabling events related to epidemic disease, especially prior to widespread vaccination. For example, the WHO has estimated that more than 20 million people who would otherwise be disabled are typically-abled today because of the poliomyelitis vaccine. The data from the pre-vaccine era is poor so it’s difficult to make such a precise claim but it’s still possible to look at historical “mass-disabling events” and to explore the ways that such events impacted society as a whole and disabled people specifically. That’s what we’re doing today. Find show notes and transcripts at www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    1 h y 1 m
  • The Section 504 Sit-In: The Protest that Demanded Civil Rights for Disabled Americans

    The Section 504 Sit-In: The Protest that Demanded Civil Rights for Disabled Americans
    Apr 21 2025
    Disability Series. Episode #2 of 4. In 1973, Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act, a bill intended to increasing hiring, extend rehabilitation services and increase assistance programs for Americans with disabilities. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, politicians and activists discussed the bill in explicitly civil rights terms, arguing that as the federal government had protected the civil rights of Black Americans and women, it must also protect the rights of disabled people. While there had been other bills focused on rehabilitation and services before, the Rehabilitation Act stood out to disabled Americans for one reason: one sentence in Section 504 of the bill. While other bills had appropriated money for services or called for programs, they didn’t include a provision for enforcement – but Section 504 did exactly that. Disabled people saw an opportunity: Section 504 could radically change life for disabled people in the United States. And when the federal government failed to fully enforce Section 504 in the years after its passage, disabled people took matters into their own hands. Find show notes and transcripts at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    1 h y 13 m
  • Sexuality and Psychiatry

    Sexuality and Psychiatry
    Apr 14 2025
    Disability Series, Episode #1 of 4. How and when scientists, doctors, and society started conceiving of the physical and emotional components of same-sex desire as a psychiatric condition of the mind? This was neither an ancient belief nor a postmodern (aka, post-1950) one, and it wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon either. Rather, the classification of same-sex desire as a “disorder” had its roots in the foundations of psychiatry as a profession in the 19th century. Over the last 100+ years, that classification impacted individuals all across the world. You’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, whose work in the 1920s standardized a form of talk therapy that sought to interpret actions, thoughts, and desires through a particular lens of analysis. “Psychoanalysis,” though short-lived as a psychiatric practice, was certainly part of the longer-term framing of queerness and transness as “mental illness.” But Freud is just the tip of the iceberg. Today we’re digging into the history and relationship between psychiatry and sexuality; the scientific theories of sexuality that helped shape modern ideas about the relations between gender, genitals, desire, and identity; and the consequences of the medicalization of sexuality. Bibliography Adriaens, Pieter R., and Block, Andreas De. Of Maybugs and Men : A History and Philosophy of the Sciences of Homosexuality, University of Chicago Press, 2022. James E. Bennett and Chris Brickell, "Surveilling the Mind and Body: Medicalising and De-medicalising Homosexuality in 1970s New Zealand," Medical History 62, no. 2 (2018): 199-216. Ross Brooks, “Transforming Sexuality: The Medical Sources of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–95) and the Origins of the Theory of Bisexuality,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 67 (2010) 177–216. Maurice Casey, “‘I want to be to Ireland what Walt Whitman was to America’: Esotericism and Queer Sexuality in an Irish Social Circle, 1890s–1920s,” History Workshop Journal, 00 (2025), 1–22. Mian Chen, "Homo(sexual) socialist: Psychiatry and homosexuality in China in the Mao and early Deng eras," Gender & History 36 (2024): 657-672. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1894) Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature (2000) John Stuart Miller, "Trip Away the Gay? LSD's Journey from Antihomosexual Psychiatry to Gay Liberationist Toy, 1955-1980," Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 33, no. 2 (May 2024) Lamia Moghnieh, "The Broken Promise of Institutional Psychiatry: Sexuality, Women and Mental Illness in 1950s Lebanon," Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 47 (2023): 82-98 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    58 m
  • Executive Orders, Dog Whistles, and the Lavender Scare

    Executive Orders, Dog Whistles, and the Lavender Scare
    Feb 24 2025
    Crime & Punishment Episode #4 of 4. In the late 1940s and 1950s, alongside the better known “Red Scare” that targeted alleged internal political enemies - American Communists - the US government led a crusade against gay men and women in the military and civil service. During the “Lavender Scare,” thousands of people were fired or forced from their jobs, dishonorably discharged from the military, and denied positions in the US government because of their sexuality. And those policies were enforced for decades - through “liberal” administrations, and the federal decriminalization of same-sex sex in 2003 - with life-ruining, and life-ending consequences for tens of thousands of Americans. And since we’re basically reliving this awful period in history because Republicans believe that a time of queer persecution, women as second class citizens, and segregation and racism is America’s “great” era, we better know the history so we can know how to fight. Bibliography Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Duke University Press, 2007). Josh Howard, The Lavender Scare, (Alexander Street Films). John Howard, Men Like That: Southern Queer History, (University of Chicago Press, 1999). David K. Johnson, “The Lavender Scare: Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Civil Service,” PhD Diss, (Northwestern University, 2000). E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) Elizabeth L. Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1993). Anna Lvovsky, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    1 h y 4 m
  • The Sleepy Lagoon Trial and Zoot Suit Riots: Los Angeles's Season of Violence During WWII

    The Sleepy Lagoon Trial and Zoot Suit Riots: Los Angeles's Season of Violence During WWII
    Feb 17 2025
    Crime and Punishment Series. Episode #3 of 4. In the summer of 1943 the city of Los Angeles erupted into what has become known as the Zoot Suit Riots, where roving bands of white servicemen beat and stripped Mexican American youth of their distinctive zoot suits. The riots took place amidst the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial- a case characterized by the press as a crackdown on Mexican American juvenile “delinquency.” In today’s episode, part of our Crime and Punishment series, we’re exploring the tender box that was Los Angeles during World War II. Find transcripts and show notes at: www.digpodcast.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
    Más Menos
    43 m