When francophone women selling sex in London evaded expulsion by claiming to have been born in Quebec, Canada, and therefore to be British subjects who could not be deported, the police did not know what to do. The cases of women who used this strategy in the 1910s and the 1930s illustrate the possibilities these women afforded themselves by selling sex in London and the difficulties of documentary legibility and legal ambiguity. The article shows how 'parastatal' organizations shaped the moral enforcement of British borders and how negotiations over dominion sovereignty and imperial mobility hinged on the categories of desirability.
While clearing out her mother's personal possessions after her death, a Canadian woman discovered a parcel of letters hidden in the jewellery drawer, which seemed to indicate her mother's love affair with another woman. This article considers the possibility of lesbian desire hidden in plain sight within the post-war nuclear family as a case study opening up broader questions of the ethics of historical practice. As the 'imaginative turn' in history prompts scholars to adopt methodologies which speculate on, or imagine, their subjects' intimate experiences and emotions, this article explores whether and how those stories can ethically be told.
This article examines how Atlantic slavery debates interacted with domestic reform demands in industrial Sheffield between 1823-48. It explores the shifting language of slavery, which has an ancient political tradition, but in the nineteenth century increasingly involved allegories between Britain's working classes and enslaved Africans. The article first analyses Sheffield's specific economic and sociopolitical heritage. Next, it investigates how slavery metaphors emerged in middle-class reform culture. Finally, it examines how slavery tropes impacted working-class radicalism. Highlighting the ways slavery terminology evolved across these different social movements unearths how broad ideas of human difference were conceptualized within provincial nineteenth-century Britain.
This article argues for the recognition of children as important subjects in sexual violence histories. We apply Lois Prosser's criminological framework of 'unsaid analysis' to a close reading of the records of the Inquiry into Child Abuse in Cleveland, UK (1987/88) to expose the many ways in which the abuse of children was denied and their voices silenced. We use this to advocate for greater attention to the methodologies and conceptual tools that historians can employ, which we argue have particular utility in recovering the histories of children and those who experience multiple marginalizations such as disabled, queer and trans people.
This article examines the methodological challenges of using oral history to research histories of sexual violence. Drawing on a project exploring rape in apartheid South Africa, it asks questions about how interviews should be conducted and how the resulting narratives can be sensitively analysed. While oral histories are subjective sources, inherently shaped by present contexts and co-created in a unique relationship between interviewee and interviewer, the article argues that these very complexities make them uniquely valuable. Oral histories do more than fill archival gaps; they also highlight how histories of violence are lived, contested, and understood in the present.
