Category: Biopolitics
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The CPUSA and public health dangers in the 1930s: Syphilis and TB
This is the fourth blog post (out of now five) on the CPUSA’s health journal from the 1930s. The other posts are available here, here and here. Syphilis Syphilis was seen as one of the primary public health problems in the United States in the 1930s, with a greater number of people with syphilis living…
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Age disputes and the non-medical use of x-rays in the UK border control system
Tory backbencher David Davies has recently called for dental x-rays to verify the ages of refugees coming from Calais. Although these calls were dismissed by the Home Office and the British Dental Association, this is an issue that has lingered since the 1970s. Below is a post based on an article that Marinella Marmo and…
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Appeal for primary source material on British/Irish left & female hunger strikers at Armagh 1980
Recently the Irish Times has started running a series of articles on the history of the 1980-81 hunger strikes in the lead up to a symposium being held on the subject in London in June 2016. One of the articles by Maria Power discussed the hunger strike undertaken by three republican women in Armagh Prison…
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Determining the number of ‘virginity testing’ cases within the UK immigration control system
On this day (February 19) in 1979, Labour MP Jo Richardson led the criticism in the House of Commons of the Home Office and the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees over the gynaecological and physical examinations conducted upon South Asian women migrating to the UK, colloquially known as ‘virginity testing’. During this session of parliament, Rees…
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UK border control has long history of screening for ‘unhealthy’ migrants
High on the excitement of a potential by-election victory this week, UKIP’s Nigel Farage has called for immigration restrictions on people with HIV. This proposal has been roundly criticised as prejudiced against people with HIV, as well as impractical (as argued by The Guardian‘s Sarah Boseley). But Farage’s suggestion taps into a longer history of…
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Another endorsement for our forthcoming book
Following on from the very nice endorsements that I blogged about last month, I thought I’d mention this wonderful endorsement we received from Imogen Tyler, author of the brilliant Revolting Subjects and the Social Abjection blog. Tyler writes: This historical study examines the intertwining of ‘race’, gender and the body in the application of immigration…
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Endorsements for our forthcoming book
I’m pretty chuffed at these two endorsements we have received for our forthcoming book, Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control: Subject to Examination (Palgrave Macmillan) and would like to share them with you all: “An important and revelatory study of a shameful episode in 20th century British immigration history that was shaped…
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Forthcoming: Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control – Subject to Examination
I am pleased to announce that the forthcoming book by Marinella Marmo and myself, Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control: Subject to Examination, will be published in July by Palgrave Macmillan and is already available for pre-order! The description of the book on Palgrave’s website is: Race, Gender and the Body in…
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The ‘virginity testing’ controversy 35 years on
On February 1, 1979, Melanie Phillips wrote an explosive piece in The Guardian about the practice of ‘virginity testing’ that was experienced by an Indian woman at Heathrow during her attempt to pass through border control. Over the following two months, it came to light that theses ‘tests’ were much more widely practiced than initially…
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New journal article – ‘The Myth of Sovereignty: British Immigration Control in Policy and Practice in the Nineteen-Seventies’
This is just a quick post to announce that our long-awaited article in Historical Research journal has now been published online through early view and can found here. The title of the article is ‘The Myth of Sovereignty: British Immigration Control in Policy and Practice in the Nineteen-Seventies’, with the following abstract: This article explores how…
New Historical Express 