The Gender and Sexuality Collection is a valuable resource for university librarians, researchers, and teaching staff. This collection delves into themes such as domesticity, education, work, sexuality, representation, religion, mental health, activism and motherhood. By surveying gender identity and sexuality from diverse perspectives, it raises critical questions about gender roles, feminist theory and heteronormativity. Covering a broad historical range from the medieval period to the present day, this collection is indispensable for those engaged in gender and sexuality studies.
| Key series |
| Gender in History |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Imperialism |
| Theory for a Global Age |
| Women, Theatre and Performance |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 7 |
| 2023/4 titles | 12 |
| 2004-2022 titles | 89 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Domesticity |
| Education |
| Work |
| Nature |
| Sexuality |
| Heteronormativity |
| Representation |
| Religion |
| Global South |
| Mental health |
| Motherhood |
| Gender roles |
| Activism |
| Feminism |
| Beauty |
| Thema subject categories |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History |
| Economics |
| Politics and government |
| The Arts |
| Feminism and feminist theory |
| Film history, theory or criticism |
| Gender studies, gender groups |
| History of religion |
| LGBTQ+ Studies / topics |
SDG coverage
Gender and sexuality collection
The introduction of Teenage intimacies begins by setting out three key contexts that informed the experiences of the post-war generation. It traces the ‘rise of the teenager’ from the 1950s, outlines changes associated with the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the long 1960s, and gives an overview of changes in the status of women in English society after the Second World War. It argues that this study of young women’s sexuality offers new perspectives on each of these histories but also sheds new light on the broader histories of intimacy and social change in the post-war period. The introduction goes on to discuss the two key types of reflective testimony used in this research: oral history interviews and submissions to the Mass Observation Project. It argues that personal testimonies offer unparalleled insights into the everyday nature of intimacy and specific details of sexual activity that are not usually recorded in archival sources. By incorporating details of sexual activity into broader life histories, Teenage intimacies explores the different meanings that sexuality and intimacy had for individuals in the past. The final section of the introduction sets out the book’s overarching argument – that understandings of what sex was and what it was for shifted in this period as sex became embedded in understandings of ‘growing up’ and became a prominent aspect of young people’s social.
Most teenage girls of the post-war generation lived at home with their parents until they got married. This chapter explores how this seemingly simple fact informed young women’s understandings of sexuality and what this living situation meant for their sexual practice. Exploring curfew rules and the ritual of romantic partners ‘meeting the parents’, the chapter illustrates how deeply invested girls were in making sure that their romantic lives fit (or at least did not cause trouble) within their home lives. Girls valued their relationships with their parents and did not want to ruin these family ties. As the chapter goes on to demonstrate, however, the matter of girls’ sexuality was a potential threat to familial peace. While teenage girls saw sex as a step on the way to adulthood, a way of expressing intimacy within their relationships, and as a means of gaining social status, their parents often valued chastity and stressed that sex was to be saved for marriage. Teenage girls therefore had to navigate a treacherous terrain in which conforming to the ‘modern’ sexual values of their peers had the potential to put them in conflict with their parents. The consequence of this was that young women’s sexual lives became characterised by a politics of evasion and secrecy as teenagers pursued sexual activity but wished to make sure that their parents did not know about it. For the post-war generation, teenage sex was synonymous with sneaking around and their rebellion was a secret one.
This chapter explores how ideas of the future shaped teenage girls’ sexual lives. Reflecting on their adolescent selves, women of the post-war generation understood their teenage sexual practice as a balancing act as they attempted to manage their sexual presents in relation to their imagined futures. In the post-war period, pre-marital pregnancy was almost universally seen as dangerous and destructive to young women. At a time when girls had expanded opportunities for education and careers and new-found expectations of love-based marriage, pregnancy was a threat to the futures that girls imagined for themselves. The relationship between fears of pregnancy, contraceptive use and girls’ sexual practice was not clear-cut, however. For some girls, the fear of pregnancy was a powerful disincentive from engaging in penetrative sex, while for others, sex was only an option when they were able to use birth control that they felt secure in. For others still, though, fears of pregnancy did not translate into abstinence or the use of contraception. Of course, extra-marital pregnancies did occur and the final part of the chapter considers how young women responded to becoming pregnant. After acknowledging many young women’s recourse to abortion, the chapter discusses marriage and unplanned motherhood. Ultimately, while pregnancy might have led girls astray from the futures they imagined for themselves as teenagers, many women had been able to find alternative, equally meaningful roles and identities for themselves.
Teenage intimacies offers an essential new perspective on the so-called ‘sexual revolution’. Drawing on 280 personal testimonies, it reveals how young women changed sexual values, cultures and practices in England in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Rather than charting technological change or media portrayals of sex, the book foregrounds the lived experience of adolescent heterosexuality. In so doing, it finds that outside ‘Swinging London’, a quieter, more mundane transformation in sexual culture was taking place. This sexual revolution was playing out in school playgrounds, church youth clubs, local cinemas and suburban bedrooms, and teenage girls were in its vanguard.
Beyond simply putting young women’s experiences on the record, Teenage intimacies proposes new explanations of how and why sexual values changed in the mid-century. The book argues that young people’s understandings of sex and the role it played in their lives changed significantly in the post-war period. It shows how ideas about ‘growing up’ increasingly structured experiences of adolescent sexuality. Teenagers came to understand their sexuality not simply as a feature of relationships and marriage but as an essential part of their own development and progress towards adulthood. Teenage intimacies also argues, however, that individual sexuality must be placed in its social context: the process of ‘becoming sexual’ was profoundly shaped by teenagers’ relationships with their romantic partners, friends and peers, and their families. In telling this story, the book shows how we can write new histories of intimacy and see personal relationships as important drivers of social change.
Assemblages of Cancer offers a comparative, in-depth analysis of breast cancer in the UK, France and Italy, linking patients’ experiences with the biomedical, political and cultural context of the disease. The book is based on ten years of ethnographic research with patients and medical professionals across the three countries. It shows how breast cancer experiences can be best understood as provisional assemblages involving transformed bodies, uncertainties due to a possible relapse, and tinkering with standardised protocols and pathways to make treatments work for each patient. The analysis highlights the shared specificities and internal variations of breast cancer in the three countries. It explores how universal healthcare systems impacted by privatisation processes, local variations in the workings of biomedicine, and local changes to the North American pink ribbon discourses and advocacy transform the experiences of breast cancer. The book presents an in-depth analysis of how breast cancer and its treatments alter not only women’s bodies but also their personal and professional lives. It further analyses patients’ strategies to rebuild new meaning and values around the uncertainties brought by cancer and to counter its consequences. Across the chapters, the analyses cover questions linked to the organisation of healthcare systems, cultural discourses about breast cancer, and medical innovation. They connect these topics to how patients’ bodies are redefined and how their experiences and expectations for the future change. Additionally, they examine how breast cancer affects patients’ working lives and relationships, ultimately leading to a new understanding of the disease in Europe today.
This chapter explores the experiences of patients coming to terms with the different ways in which cancer treatments change their bodies through surgery. It discusses how most patients undergoing a breast reconstruction do not necessarily abide by a gendered idea of how a female body should be, and have different aims. Some try to obtain a breast as similar as possible to the pre-operative one, seeking access to the techniques with the more ‘natural’ result; others look only for a breast volume that can be passed for a breast in different contexts, which can be obtained through simpler techniques or through an external prosthesis. For others, the reconstruction is psychological and includes accepting an asymmetric or flat chest. In all cases, the appearance of the body is only one of the issues, and sensitivity and embodied perception are equally important. The chapter explores the multiple meanings and uses of breast reconstruction, showing how the study of the different ways to assemble a post-surgical body allows us to go beyond the debate focused on the concepts of agency and resistance that have characterised the feminist analysis of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery. Patients’ orientations contrast with those of medical professionals, who often follow the aims of aesthetic surgery and more restrictive gender norms in trying to obtain a breast that fits the dominant canon and that is ideally better than the pre-diagnosis one.
This chapter explores the ramifications that a breast cancer diagnosis has on the different aspects of women’s lives, further offering an overview of the strategies they use to reconfigure their lives and those of their families. It first discusses how the working lives of those diagnosed in working age have been impacted and redefined by cancer. Several interviewees have described the cancer as an event that brought them to rethink their priorities, reducing their engagement with jobs that, in some cases, they did not appreciate in the first place. However, other women, especially those in the metastatic phase, have been unable to continue to work in roles they liked and that fulfilled their lives because of the disability brought by the illness and a lack of adjustments by employers. A second point explored is the relationship with partners and families. The gendered nature of breast cancer extends to how care is redefined within the family and to the degree to which different interviewees can rely on support from their partners and family. While many interviewees described being able to rely on several people during their illness, in some cases the illness was described as characterised by limited support or the end of the relationship with a partner. Finally, the chapter explores how the illness has redefined friendships and how sometimes friendships have become part of the support available.
This chapter discusses the role of medical innovation in the continued redefinition of breast cancer. The oncologists interviewed were often optimistic about the potential of targeted treatments and immunotherapy, hoping both to transform metastatic breast cancer into a chronic disease with longer survival times and to reduce relapse of early-stage breast cancer through adjuvant therapies. The segmentation of breast cancer not only according to stages but also according to the biological profile of the tumour is rearranging it as a group of diseases occurring in the same bodily location – the breast. Moreover, the availability of targeted treatments particularly effective for some subtypes of breast cancer allows the emergence of new biomedical rhetorics that present early-stage breast cancer as curable and metastatic breast cancer as a condition that can become chronic. However, some of the medical professionals interviewed recognised the continuing challenges in the treatment of breast cancer, especially in the metastatic phase. The introduction of new treatments, which can see delays in approval or unequal geographic distribution, has created a complex therapeutic landscape that patients can find challenging to navigate, as well as inequalities in access to specific treatments. Using in-depth interviews with patients, the chapter analyses how patients deal with medical innovation. In particular, it explores how patients negotiate with the biomedical establishment for access to specific treatments. Patients deal with the power and prestige asymmetries in the doctor–patient relationship to assemble their combination of treatments.
This chapter discusses the different kinds of uncertainty that a breast cancer diagnosis brings and the provisional and precarious nature of the post-diagnosis life. A diagnosis of cancer always involves a shock, and the chapter first explores how it introduces a disruption in patients’ biographies and how they attempt to manage the uncertainty that the cancer causes. Women can use different strategies to regain control of their lives; in some cases, they search for medical professionals and institutions that they feel can be trusted; in other cases, they try to regain control by acquiring information and becoming experts on their condition. Even when the treatments have obtained the best of currently possible results – ‘no evidence of disease’ – the possibility of relapse extends the uncertainty of patients. In this context, some types of treatment have been extended to reduce the risk of relapse, creating a new normal. For patients with metastatic breast cancer, there is an even more profound uncertainty: while dying from the condition becomes almost certain, current treatments have extended the survival times for many patients, but, at an individual level, women do not know whether treatments will be effective for them, for how long, and the impact that a specific treatment will have on their life. Women do not know how much time they have left or how to organise it. The uncertainty and provisionality of breast cancer have created a liminal space between a chronic and a terminal condition that women inhabit uncomfortably.
The Conclusion links the individual illness narratives with the biomedical, political and cultural context of breast cancer in the UK, France and Italy. It shows how comparing three different countries and looking at structural phenomena and embodied experiences can demonstrate how medical innovation, the organisation of healthcare and the gendered discourses around breast cancer all influence the experiences of illness. The comparison further illustrates the specificities of the Western European context when compared with the well-studied North American context and identifies the differences between the three countries. The chapter shows the continuities in patients’ experiences linked to the diffusion of mostly standardised treatments and the circulation of similar discourses around breast cancer. At the same time, both biomedicine and the image of breast cancer are redefined locally, and the experiences of individual patients can change significantly between national healthcare contexts. In this sense, ethnographic work across three West European countries reveals both how local contexts shape the treatment of breast cancer and how, in each context, there are points of contact in the experiences across different subtypes of breast cancer. There is a tendency in biomedicine to segment breast cancer into a growing number of distinct conditions and to present it as having standardised outcomes when given access to adequate treatment. However, the conclusions underline the similarity of patients’ experiences with different biomarkers, while also underlining how much of the final experience is social and depends on contextual, non-biological factors.