What kind of sex education did you have, if you had any at all? I’m always interested in hearing about people’s experiences of sex education in school, but whatever your experiences have been, I can bet that it was not as helpful as it could have been. Yeah, remember these from sex ed class? [...]
Introduction
Zoë Brigley Thompson is the author of three books of poetry: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007), all published by Bloodaxe. She also has a collection of nonfiction essays, Notes from a Swing State (Parthian 2019), and edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (with Sorcha Gunne).
Recommendations
"Brigley's sense of social justice is woven with delicacy and strength, in a voice that is neither daunted nor hectoring. She is attuned to the most subtle forms of both violence and hope, and so with often startlingly beautiful imagery can offer the reader new ways of gathering morale in disheartening times." -- Emily Trahair
about this site
Back in 2004, I started a blog called The Midnight Heart via Warwick Blogs, which the Times Higher Education Supplement listed as one to watch. This new site is a continuation of what I started there.
Blog
On Smiling, Or Not
A feminist call might be a call to anger, to develop a sense of rage about collective wrongs.– Sara Ahmed Most women have had it happen to them. Walking back to the car one day after work, I am thinking about all the things I have to do, when a man stops me. “You should [...]
Sinister Myth: The Harpy and the Medusa
[Featured image by Christian Schloe, Lost in a Dream.] I am very excited this month to see the first episodes of my podcast going live, a project which I developed with Brendan Walsh. The title is Sinister Myth: How Stories We Tell Perpetuate Violence, and the logo was designed by the brilliant Breanne LeJeune. But [...]
A Note on Remembering Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson
Early on in the Sexuality Studies course I'm teaching, we read some extracts from Harvey Milk’s writings, especially where he was defending gay teachers from campaigns that sought to eliminate them from the classroom. Harvey Milk’s work is memorialized - his speeches have been recorded and published for example - but the work of other [...]
Welsh Ladies
I felt very lucky to recently have an opportunity to be interviewed for a program on BBC Radio 4. It was a program created by writer Mab Jones, who had an idea inspired by a series of postcards she collected featuring women in traditional Welsh dress. She started to wonder about what the women would [...]
Fright House: America, Halloween, and the Midterms
I have a new article out today in Wales Arts Review, which tries to capture the strange time before elections in America, when the midterm hype coincides with Halloween. Halloween was not really celebrated in the US until the 1920s, brought over by white immigrants, but it has become a national craze, and far more [...]
F*ck Self-help
I had an essay out last month on The Manifest Station titled 'Fuck Self-help.' It's about all the women I know who have come to me for advice on whether their relationship is abusive, and it also tells something about my own experience of intimate partner violence. What the past has taught me is that [...]
Frankenstein and Reproductive Rights 200 Years On
“If we could perceive death as a part of pregnancy, we might just take women more seriously.” These words are taken from a recent article on ‘Mothers as Makers of Death,’ published by Claudia Dey in the Paris Review, in which she affirms a darker alternative to the Hallmark version of motherhood. Mary Shelley also [...]
Revamped course next semester… on sexuality and violence…
I was recently really pleased to receive an Affordable Learning Exchange grant to revamp my course 'Sexuality and Violence.' Here's how it looks for next semester. ----- Sexuality Studies 5620: Sexuality and Violence Tuesday / Thursday 2.20pm – 3.40pm Ohio State University Spring 2019 ZoëBrigley Thompson thompson.3022@osu.edu Figure 1: Change Mural by Krystal Roig-Palmer, [...]
On Branwen’s Horses
I have been thinking and writing about the Welsh legend of Branwen recently, in this micro-chapbook out with the Poetry Annals, Blind Horse Elegy (cover image by Victoria Brookland), and in the title poem itself which was a runner up in the Hopper Poetry Prize. When I think of the story of Branwen, I think of [...]
