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
Starting with a discussion of the dominant international discourse around breast cancer linked to the ‘pink ribbon’ rhetoric, this chapter analyses how those discourses are adapted and transformed in the France, Italy and the UK and their impact on patients’ experiences. The US-based Komen Foundation was among the first associations to promote a rhetoric of prevention through early detection, merged with an injunction to optimism and a glamorous communication style. National charities and associations and charities in all three countries, as well as local healthcare authorities, have introduced campaigns in line with the pink ribbon rhetoric. However, some important changes are innovating the social and cultural understanding of breast cancer; for instance, metastatic breast cancer, usually invisibilised, has gained visibility in some more recent campaigns. Using interviews with different patient advocates and activists and fieldwork involving participant observation of several advocacy and activist initiatives and events, the chapter analyses the different opportunities for advocacy in the three countries. It also explores the various ways in which patients react to neoliberal injunctions to optimism. If, for some people, a diagnosis can be a catalyst of positive changes, the majority remain sceptical of rhetoric that fails to address their uncertainties about the development and possible recurrence of cancer. As breast cancer is the source of significant uncertainties, requiring patients to assemble their knowledge about the possible evolution of their cancer, a context of contradictory messages further complicates theit experiences of breast cancer.
The Introduction presents breast cancer as both a success story that has made it a paradigm for cancer in general and a prism that can help understand social phenomena. It discusses the concept of assemblage, which defines bodies as normally connected to physical and social elements outside the boundaries of the skin. This concept allows us to understand how the bodies of women with breast cancer are transformed by surgery and other therapies and influenced by medical tools and institutions. The chapter further discusses how, despite the aim to systematise knowledge and standardise treatments and pathways, patients still have to conduct their assemblage work to draw together the existing information and access the different treatments. The assemblage approach also allows the linking of transformations in breast cancer treatments with the social discourse about cancer, national healthcare institutions and patients’ experiences. The chapter shows the mutual reinforcement between the cancer schemata based on early detection, the social scripts that invite patients to be optimistic, and the regimes that present breast cancer both as containable through screening and allowing targeted treatments. It also discusses how the highly gendered image of breast cancer produces injunctions located at the intersection between gender norms and neoliberalism. The advantages of studying comparatively the UK, France and Italy are discussed, highlighting the specificities of Western Europe in terms of organisation of healthcare, advocacy landscape and the public image of cancer.
This chapter looks at how the organisation of national healthcare systems and the oncology services within them influences the experience of patients with breast cancer. UK, France and Italy have universalistic, high-quality public services that cover most cancer treatments free of charge. However, the chapter shows the different ways cancer treatment is partially privatised in the three countries, from charities taking charge of services and funding in the UK to the parallel offer of treatments in the private sector. In addition, the rapid development of new treatments for metastatic breast cancer introduces the question of how rapidly these costly treatments are authorised for use in the public sector. The combination of being pushed to resort to the private sector for some treatments and not being able to access some of the most recent treatments has introduced dimensions of economic inequality into healthcare systems that are usually considered universalistic. A further important element is how patients move between different medical institutions to access different treatments. While such movements are increasingly codified in standardised pathways, especially in the UK, patients often need to assemble their own trajectory across different institutions and to fill the gaps in the pathways. Moreover, patients in France and Italy are more mobile, while patients in the UK show less geographic mobility. Such a situation is further linked to the unequal geographic distribution of some treatments, with the phenomena of the ‘postcode lottery’ in the UK and a strong north/south divide in Italy.
In 1926, Dorothy worked for Glacier National Park, north America, and married I. A. Richards on Honolulu in December 1926. In 1928, she, her husband and two guides successfully climbed the Dent Blanche in the Alps by its dangerous north ridge, the first ascent. For a while she became famous and was commissioned to write a book, Climbing Days, published in 1935. Her family was troubled by both her mother’s and her sister’s mental illness. The Richards went to live in China in 1929.
Dorothy Pilley grew up in a strict middle-class home where women were expected to prepare for marriage and little else. Frustrated and depressed by these restrictions, it was by chance she discovered the mountains during a holiday to Snowdonia in Wales, during the First World War. It was a life-changing experience and from then on she devoted her life to climbing and the mountains. Frustrated by the sexist attitudes of the all-male Alpine Club, she and other women formed the first feminist rock-climbing club, the Pinnacle Club, in 1921. Torn between love and the interwar restrictions marriage placed on women, she fled England for Canada and embarked on a record-breaking series of ascents.
When Ethel Gallimore was widowed just over a year after getting married, she became ill with grief. Only walking in the Peak District near her home in Sheffield saved her. In 1924 she formed a local conservation committee, to protect the Peak District from development, which would later become the Sheffield and Peak branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE). She and other ramblers also campaigned for wider public access to the forbidden moorlands of Kinder Scout, Bleaklow and other privately owned grouse-shooting estates. In 1927 her committee raised enough money to buy part of the Longshaw Estate, and handed the deeds over to the National Trust. In the early 1930s she began her campaign to have the Peak District included in the areas of land considered for designation as National Parks. When the Addiston Committee’s report into National Parks was published in 1931 she was disappointed to see the Peak District was not among the primary list of favoured areas, such as the Lake District and Snowdonia.
During the Second World War, Ethel, now Mrs Gerald Haythornthwaite, was seconded to work in the CPRE’s head office, where she worked on the plans for the creation of National Parks. She sat on the Hobhouse Committee, which recommended the Peak District should be a National Park. It was the first National Park, officially designated in April 1951 in the dying days of Clement Attlee’s government. She still had to fight motorways, racing circuits, developments and littering ramblers.
Ethel Haythornthwaite continued working for the Peak District, in an informal capacity, until her final days. The Peak District was successful in terms of negotiating access for walkers and ramblers across previously private moorland. Wangari Maathai became an MP in 2002, and in 2004 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Green Belt Movement planted more than 30 million trees. Wildlife has returned to the Karura Forest and Kenya’s tree cover has increased from less than 2 per cent, to more than 12 per cent of the land mass.
Evelyn Cheesman, born and brought up in rural Kent, nurtured her passion for nature, and in particular, insects, during her childhood. Denied the opportunity to study as a vet because of her sex, she became, in 1917, the first female Keeper of Insects at the Zoological Society of London (London Zoo). In 1920 she was promoted to Curator of Insects and joined a scientific expedition to the south Pacific which would begin a lifetime of collecting and entomological research. She visited Gorgona, the Galapagos, the Society Islands and the Marquesas. She left the expedition on Tahiti, the farthest point from home, and continued her researches alone, in a leaky hut by the side of a lagoon.
Evelyn Cheesman spent most of the 1920s and 1930s travelling and collecting in the south Pacific. She left London Zoo and began working as an unpaid volunteer at the Natural History Museum. On Malekula, New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Papua New Guinea, she began refining her theories on the movement of insects, which contributed to our understanding of the movement of continents in the ancient past. She began making radio programmes and on one, in 1956, she met a young Gerald Durrell and David Attenborough, who remembered being rather in awe of her. During the Second World War she worked for naval intelligence, drawing maps of islands in the Pacific.