Alison Downham Moore
Biographic Data
| ID | 310188 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alison Downham Moore |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alison Downham |
| FAMILY NAME | Moore |
| SIGNATURE | MOORE A D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9642-1437 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Introduction to special edition: Gender and sexual aging in the history and culture of health and medicine
Musk and Ambergris Aphrodisiacs in the Premodern Intercultural Origins of Endocrine Pharmacy
This article explores the historical uses of two animal medicines that are understood in current biomedicine to have potential endocrine activity: deer musk and whale ambergris, which were prized as aphrodisiacs in the early-modern world. It diverges from the focus in existing scholarship on nineteenth-century gonadal organotherapy as the precursor for the modern discovery of the sex-steroid hormones, looking instead at the older examples of deer…
Diverse Perspective on Health and Medicine
The Cambridge World History of Sexualities
Volume I offers historiographical surveys and general overviews of central topics in the history of world sexualities. Split across twenty-two chapters, this volume places the history of sexuality in dialogue with anthropology, women's history, LGBTQ+ history, queer theory, and public history, as well as examining the impact Freud and Foucault have had on the history of sexuality. The volume continues by providing overviews on the sexual body, fa…
The global proliferation of radical gynaecological surgeries: A history of the present
This paper asks questions about the resilience of radical gynaecological surgeries, such as hysterectomy and ovariectomy, from the moment of their widespread use in Western European and American practices of the late nineteenth century, to their renewed increase in the Indian subcontinent and Africa into our own time
Foucault's 1960s Lectures on Sexuality
In this extended review essay we discuss the lectures on sexuality which Foucault delivered in the 1960s, published in a single volume in 2018. The first part of the volume comprises five lectures given at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 to psychology students. The second part is Foucault's course 'The Discourse of Sexuality', given at the experimental University of Vincennes in 1969 in the philosophy department. We explore both the th…
Race, class, caste, disability, sterilisation and hysterectomy
This interdisciplinary historical paper focuses on the past and current state of diverse forms of surgical hysterectomy as a global phenomenon relating to population control and sterilisation. It is a paper grounded in historical inquiry but is unconventional relative to the norms of historical scholarship both in its wide geographical scope informed by the methodologies of global and intercultural history, in its critique of current clinical pra…
Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ ilm al-bah to erotology
This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medica…
Foucault's Scholarly Virtues and Sexuality Historiography
This article looks at why many historians of sexuality appear dissatisfied with the level of theoretical precision in the field by considering the reception of Foucault's approach and why some parts of it have been more difficult to assimilate within the historical discipline than others. It proposes that Foucault has been only partially understood by most historians of sexuality, with the result that the properties of his unique disciplined asce…
Aphrodisiacs in the global history of medical thought
The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in rela…
The Historicity of Sexuality: Knowledge of the Past in the Emergence of Modern Sexual Science
From the very moment the concept of sexuality emerged in nineteenth-century European medical and psychiatric thought, it became a topic of historicization. This historicization formed a consistent habit of thought in many of the medical and psychiatric texts that first enunciated sexuality as a distinct field of meaning. Dialogue between doctors and the first historians of sexuality informed the emergence of both sexology and of the historiograph…
Foucault, Early Christian Ideas of Genitalia, and the History of Sexuality
Temporal Layering in the Long Conceptual History of Sexual Medicine: Reading Koselleck with Foucault
This paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault's statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck's own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple 'temporal layers.' The l…
Genocide Instinctive Group Violence and Hominid Mass Killing: Toward a Biohumanistic Historical Perspective
Conceptual layers in the invention of menopause in nineteenth-century France
Journal Article Conceptual layers in the invention of menopause in nineteenth-century France Get access Alison M Moore Alison M Moore [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9642-1437 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 32, Issue 2, June 2018, Pages 226–248, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/cry006 Published: 03 May 2018
Victorian Medicine Was Not Responsible for Repressing the Clitoris: Rethinking Homology in the Long History of Women's Genital Anatomy
Narratives about female sexual pleasure frequently make recourse to teleological views of historical development that posit the present as relatively more enlightened than past repressive attitudes. The teleology usually takes the form of recognizing early modern accounts of the clitoris but denying the vast array of nineteenth-century sources that had significantly more holistic views about female pleasure than is often imagined. Any scholar who…
L’Amour morbide: How a transient mental illness became defunct
Across a broad range of late nineteenth-century French medical texts that described the newly denoted sexual pathologies of frigidity, inversion, fetishism, nymphomania, sadism and masochism, one finds a term being used for which no current equivalent exists. This term is l’amour morbide – morbid love. Its use was initially as common in respectable medical texts as it later became in erotic fictional writings. In some cases, it appeared to refer …
Stigma and family relationships of middle-aged gay men in recovery
The primary objective of this study was to explore how middle-aged gay men in recovery cope with stigma and family relationships. For gay men, perceptions of acceptance of their sexual orientation and degree of social connectedness can play a role in their recovery from alcohol and substance use disorders. Yet gay men may have a more difficult time accessing certain family-level health resources because their families of origin may stigmatize, re…
Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism, and Historical Teleology
Sadism as Social Violence
Negotiating Emotional Support: Sober Gay Latinos and Their Families
This study explores how sober gay Latino men obtain support from their families. Familial ties can be a protective health factor, yet many gay Latinos experience rejection from family members because of their sexuality. There are very few studies that examine the extent and quality of emotional support from kin for this population. Understanding family dynamics within the context of recovery and sexuality can increase our understanding of how to …
The spectacular anus of Joseph Pujol: Recovering the Pétomane’s unique historic context
Joseph Pujol, the ‘Pétomane’ performed to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge in the early 1890s. By 1906 one of his contemporaries would remark that ‘this artist’s specialty was no longer in fashion’. When legal battles occurred between Pujol and the Moulin Rouge, newspaper commentaries were filled with hilarity that a man whose anus was the source of his income was now trying to gain a fortune from it. What might the spectacular anus of Pujol,…
Frigidity: An Intellectual History
This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, sh
Is the Unspeakable Singable? The Ethics of Holocaust Representation and the Reception of Górecki's Symphony no.3
Debates about Holocaust representation have long been haunted by the idea that the enormity and intensity of human suffering in the events of World War Two are ‘unspeakable’. In many such statements the capacity for cognition and the ethical dimension of aestheticisation are blurred – the Holocaust is ‘unspeakable’ both in the sense of being impossible to imagine in its full horror, but also morally inappropriate as the subject of artistic produc…
Arcane Erotica and National 'Patrimony: Britain's Private Case and the Collection de l'Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
This article considers the broad politics of the creation and maintenance of two large erotica collections in European national libraries across their histories and in relation to definitions of censorship and obscenity. It also examines the popular and intellectual discourses that have surrounded the Collection de l'Enfer and the Private Case of the British Library, and imbued them with a particular cultural mystique as repositories of secret, h…
Aphrodisiacs in the global history of medical thought
The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in rela…
Negotiating Emotional Support: Sober Gay Latinos and Their Families
This study explores how sober gay Latino men obtain support from their families. Familial ties can be a protective health factor, yet many gay Latinos experience rejection from family members because of their sexuality. There are very few studies that examine the extent and quality of emotional support from kin for this population. Understanding family dynamics within the context of recovery and sexuality can increase our understanding of how to …
The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality
How important is a new word for the development of newly imagined sexual pathology? In the case of the neologism 'sadism' at the fin de siècle, this invention was strangely both pivotal and incidental. Tracking sexual concepts, as Laqueur does for masturbation, requires that the neologisms invented at precise historic moments be both recontextualized in relation to earlier discourses, and problematized as stable constructs in their ongoing develo…
History, Memory and Trauma in Photography of the Tondues: Visuality of the Vichy Past through the Silent Image of Women
In numerous surveys of modern European history one can find examples of iconic visual representations of the `tondues: French women targeted as collaborators and whose heads were shaven in rituals of public disgrace during and after the defeat of German forces at the end of World War II.1 As images of humiliation, popular retribution, implicitly sexualised but muted corporeal violence, the tondue photos are striking, arresting and confounding to …
Race, class, caste, disability, sterilisation and hysterectomy
This interdisciplinary historical paper focuses on the past and current state of diverse forms of surgical hysterectomy as a global phenomenon relating to population control and sterilisation. It is a paper grounded in historical inquiry but is unconventional relative to the norms of historical scholarship both in its wide geographical scope informed by the methodologies of global and intercultural history, in its critique of current clinical pra…
Relocating Marie Bonaparte's Clitoris
We make no apology for the fact that our chapter on psychoanalytic understandings of frigidity focuses more on the work of Marie Bonaparte than on that of Freud or any other psychoanalyst. Without doubt, Bonaparte was a Freudian thinker, and Freud’s teleological mapping of feminine pleasure between clitoris and vagina helped structure the ideas of Bonaparte and of all other psychoanalytic thinkers who wrote about female sexuality throughout the f…
Victorian Medicine Was Not Responsible for Repressing the Clitoris: Rethinking Homology in the Long History of Women's Genital Anatomy
Narratives about female sexual pleasure frequently make recourse to teleological views of historical development that posit the present as relatively more enlightened than past repressive attitudes. The teleology usually takes the form of recognizing early modern accounts of the clitoris but denying the vast array of nineteenth-century sources that had significantly more holistic views about female pleasure than is often imagined. Any scholar who…
L’Amour morbide: How a transient mental illness became defunct
Across a broad range of late nineteenth-century French medical texts that described the newly denoted sexual pathologies of frigidity, inversion, fetishism, nymphomania, sadism and masochism, one finds a term being used for which no current equivalent exists. This term is l’amour morbide – morbid love. Its use was initially as common in respectable medical texts as it later became in erotic fictional writings. In some cases, it appeared to refer …
Recovering Difference in the Deleuzian Dichotomy of Masochism-Without-Sadism
Foucault's 1960s Lectures on Sexuality
In this extended review essay we discuss the lectures on sexuality which Foucault delivered in the 1960s, published in a single volume in 2018. The first part of the volume comprises five lectures given at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 to psychology students. The second part is Foucault's course 'The Discourse of Sexuality', given at the experimental University of Vincennes in 1969 in the philosophy department. We explore both the th…
Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ ilm al-bah to erotology
This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medica…
Foucault's Scholarly Virtues and Sexuality Historiography
This article looks at why many historians of sexuality appear dissatisfied with the level of theoretical precision in the field by considering the reception of Foucault's approach and why some parts of it have been more difficult to assimilate within the historical discipline than others. It proposes that Foucault has been only partially understood by most historians of sexuality, with the result that the properties of his unique disciplined asce…
Foucault, Early Christian Ideas of Genitalia, and the History of Sexuality
Temporal Layering in the Long Conceptual History of Sexual Medicine: Reading Koselleck with Foucault
This paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault's statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck's own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple 'temporal layers.' The l…
Stigma and family relationships of middle-aged gay men in recovery
The primary objective of this study was to explore how middle-aged gay men in recovery cope with stigma and family relationships. For gay men, perceptions of acceptance of their sexual orientation and degree of social connectedness can play a role in their recovery from alcohol and substance use disorders. Yet gay men may have a more difficult time accessing certain family-level health resources because their families of origin may stigmatize, re…
Frigidity, Gender and Power in French Cultural History: From Jean Fauconney to Marie Bonaparte
This paper interrogates the commonplace view of frigidity as a notion always founded upon the misogynist failure to understand female sexual specificity. As an historical explanation, this view fails to take into account the contextual parameters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about female desire within which the notion of la femme frigide emerged and developed. This paper discusses the work of a range of French medical a…
History, Memory and Trauma in Photography of the Tondues: Visuality of the Vichy Past through the Silent Image of Women
In numerous surveys of modern European history one can find examples of iconic visual representations of the `tondues: French women targeted as collaborators and whose heads were shaven in rituals of public disgrace during and after the defeat of German forces at the end of World War II.1 As images of humiliation, popular retribution, implicitly sexualised but muted corporeal violence, the tondue photos are striking, arresting and confounding to …
Frigidity, Gender and Power in French Cultural History: From Jean Fauconney to Marie Bonaparte
This paper interrogates the commonplace view of frigidity as a notion always founded upon the misogynist failure to understand female sexual specificity. As an historical explanation, this view fails to take into account the contextual parameters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about female desire within which the notion of la femme frigide emerged and developed. This paper discusses the work of a range of French medical a…
Recovering Difference in the Deleuzian Dichotomy of Masochism-Without-Sadism
Relocating Marie Bonaparte's Clitoris
We make no apology for the fact that our chapter on psychoanalytic understandings of frigidity focuses more on the work of Marie Bonaparte than on that of Freud or any other psychoanalyst. Without doubt, Bonaparte was a Freudian thinker, and Freud’s teleological mapping of feminine pleasure between clitoris and vagina helped structure the ideas of Bonaparte and of all other psychoanalytic thinkers who wrote about female sexuality throughout the f…
The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality
How important is a new word for the development of newly imagined sexual pathology? In the case of the neologism 'sadism' at the fin de siècle, this invention was strangely both pivotal and incidental. Tracking sexual concepts, as Laqueur does for masturbation, requires that the neologisms invented at precise historic moments be both recontextualized in relation to earlier discourses, and problematized as stable constructs in their ongoing develo…
Age and Identity in Funerary Contexts: The Elderly in Southern Roman Britain
Preface and Editors’ Preface
Sadean nature and reasoned morality in Adorno/Horkheimer'sDialectic of Enlightenment
This article critiques Frankfurt School philosophical claims that blame the eighteenth-century philosophical Enlightenment, and the pornographic texts of the Marquis de Sade in particular, for the development of attitudes to sexual desire and morality that led supposedly to the genocidal hatred of Nazism. It examines the use of the concept of 'nature' in the work of Sade and compares this to the 'Nature' of Frankfurt School and other psychoanalyt…
Frigidity: An Intellectual History
This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, sh
Is the Unspeakable Singable? The Ethics of Holocaust Representation and the Reception of Górecki's Symphony no.3
Debates about Holocaust representation have long been haunted by the idea that the enormity and intensity of human suffering in the events of World War Two are ‘unspeakable’. In many such statements the capacity for cognition and the ethical dimension of aestheticisation are blurred – the Holocaust is ‘unspeakable’ both in the sense of being impossible to imagine in its full horror, but also morally inappropriate as the subject of artistic produc…
Arcane Erotica and National 'Patrimony: Britain's Private Case and the Collection de l'Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
This article considers the broad politics of the creation and maintenance of two large erotica collections in European national libraries across their histories and in relation to definitions of censorship and obscenity. It also examines the popular and intellectual discourses that have surrounded the Collection de l'Enfer and the Private Case of the British Library, and imbued them with a particular cultural mystique as repositories of secret, h…
The spectacular anus of Joseph Pujol: Recovering the Pétomane’s unique historic context
Joseph Pujol, the ‘Pétomane’ performed to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge in the early 1890s. By 1906 one of his contemporaries would remark that ‘this artist’s specialty was no longer in fashion’. When legal battles occurred between Pujol and the Moulin Rouge, newspaper commentaries were filled with hilarity that a man whose anus was the source of his income was now trying to gain a fortune from it. What might the spectacular anus of Pujol,…
Sadism as Social Violence
Negotiating Emotional Support: Sober Gay Latinos and Their Families
This study explores how sober gay Latino men obtain support from their families. Familial ties can be a protective health factor, yet many gay Latinos experience rejection from family members because of their sexuality. There are very few studies that examine the extent and quality of emotional support from kin for this population. Understanding family dynamics within the context of recovery and sexuality can increase our understanding of how to …
Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism, and Historical Teleology
Stigma and family relationships of middle-aged gay men in recovery
The primary objective of this study was to explore how middle-aged gay men in recovery cope with stigma and family relationships. For gay men, perceptions of acceptance of their sexual orientation and degree of social connectedness can play a role in their recovery from alcohol and substance use disorders. Yet gay men may have a more difficult time accessing certain family-level health resources because their families of origin may stigmatize, re…
L’Amour morbide: How a transient mental illness became defunct
Across a broad range of late nineteenth-century French medical texts that described the newly denoted sexual pathologies of frigidity, inversion, fetishism, nymphomania, sadism and masochism, one finds a term being used for which no current equivalent exists. This term is l’amour morbide – morbid love. Its use was initially as common in respectable medical texts as it later became in erotic fictional writings. In some cases, it appeared to refer …
Genocide Instinctive Group Violence and Hominid Mass Killing: Toward a Biohumanistic Historical Perspective
Conceptual layers in the invention of menopause in nineteenth-century France
Journal Article Conceptual layers in the invention of menopause in nineteenth-century France Get access Alison M Moore Alison M Moore [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9642-1437 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 32, Issue 2, June 2018, Pages 226–248, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/cry006 Published: 03 May 2018
Victorian Medicine Was Not Responsible for Repressing the Clitoris: Rethinking Homology in the Long History of Women's Genital Anatomy
Narratives about female sexual pleasure frequently make recourse to teleological views of historical development that posit the present as relatively more enlightened than past repressive attitudes. The teleology usually takes the form of recognizing early modern accounts of the clitoris but denying the vast array of nineteenth-century sources that had significantly more holistic views about female pleasure than is often imagined. Any scholar who…
The Historicity of Sexuality: Knowledge of the Past in the Emergence of Modern Sexual Science
From the very moment the concept of sexuality emerged in nineteenth-century European medical and psychiatric thought, it became a topic of historicization. This historicization formed a consistent habit of thought in many of the medical and psychiatric texts that first enunciated sexuality as a distinct field of meaning. Dialogue between doctors and the first historians of sexuality informed the emergence of both sexology and of the historiograph…
Foucault, Early Christian Ideas of Genitalia, and the History of Sexuality
Temporal Layering in the Long Conceptual History of Sexual Medicine: Reading Koselleck with Foucault
This paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault's statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck's own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple 'temporal layers.' The l…
Foucault's Scholarly Virtues and Sexuality Historiography
This article looks at why many historians of sexuality appear dissatisfied with the level of theoretical precision in the field by considering the reception of Foucault's approach and why some parts of it have been more difficult to assimilate within the historical discipline than others. It proposes that Foucault has been only partially understood by most historians of sexuality, with the result that the properties of his unique disciplined asce…
Aphrodisiacs in the global history of medical thought
The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in rela…
Sociology (24 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · History (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Human sexuality (14 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (13 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works)