Projects

My current research lies in the intersection between medicine, gender and sexuality in Britain during the long eighteenth century. I am particularly interested in femininity, female sexuality, and women’s agency – or perceived agency – over their bodies and minds.

My doctoral research contributes a gender history of female masturbation in eighteenth-century English medical discourse. Funded by the AHRC and a grant from Funds for Women Graduates, this project reconceptualises the anti-masturbation campaign in relation to women and femininity. From 1716, self-pleasure was promoted from obscurity to become the medico-moral obsession of the age. Based on qualitative intertextual analysis of medical literature between 1700 and 1800, this study reveals how the new alarm about women’s self-pleasure was inseparable from early modern gender politics. Masturbation, I argue, was a key site of conflict for early modern femininities, with anti-masturbation commentary exploiting longstanding anxieties about female sexuality to construct a new feminine norm.