As an object, the dental dam awkwardly straddles the history of AIDS activism and queer sexuality, acting as an assertion that sex doesn’t require the presence of a penis to be real sex, while acknowledging simultaneously that such sex still carries risks. The dental dam was deployed as an object for sexual use in an attempt to abate the risk of HIV transmission, but its questionable efficacy as a barrier against the virus has reduced it, for some at least, to a latex relic of historical fears.
The 2018 Winter Conference at the Institute of Historical Research brings together leading researchers to explore the history of domestic life.
‘What is the History of Sexuality?’ at Birkbeck brought together doctoral students from across the world, and was an opportunity for their innovative research to be critiqued and developed through discussion with scholars in the field.
This, the first in a series of virtual special issues, makes freely available some of the outstanding work on women and gender in the period c.1500-1700 published by History Workshop Journal over the nearly forty years of our history.
