Matt Cook
Biographic Data
| ID | 3940920 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matt Cook |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matt |
| FAMILY NAME | Cook |
| SIGNATURE | COOK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1714-4751 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Co-researching with primary school students to retrace their digital footprint
Young children are extensively datafied today even from before birth where families may share information about them or allow them to use digital technologies at a very young age. Schools typically collect children's data for compliance and to construct a set of norms and deviance in predicting risks and educational outcomes, often without children's knowledge and consent. Yet, children's understanding of their digital footprints is limited by th…
Queering the Interior
Local Matters
This article compares queer social scenes in the 1960s in three English towns and cities: Brighton and Plymouth on the south coast and Manchester in the northwest. It considers how queer experience in these places was affected by local identities, demographics, geographies, and socioeconomic circumstances and so demonstrates how and why the local matters to queer scenes and lives, even in the midst of wider burgeoning mass and connective cultures…
Local turns
This piece presents one strand of new research from “Queer Beyond London” (QBL), a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project which ran from 2016 to 2018 and sought out the significance of locality to queer identities and communities in the period 1965–2015 via case studies of Brighton, Leeds, Manchester, and Plymouth. The project is part of a (re)turn to the local in queer historical work, and here I review that shift before exemplif…
Sex Lives and Diary Writing
This chapter explores the interplay of the different voices, modes of self understanding and methods of self narration in the diary, and shows how Ives&s;s longing for cogency and coherence is mired by multiplicity and complexity, indicating a deeply conflicted sense of self. George Ives, the early campaigner for homosexual law reform, is reticent about his sex life in his diary for the 1890s and early 1900s. Sex, Margaretta Jolly observes, is &s…
Unnamed Desires
Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History / Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–1945: Queer Identities in the Second World War." Australian Historical Studies, 48(1), pp. 132–133
Aids, Mass Observation, and the Fate of the Permissive Turn
Archives of Feeling
This piece is an extended version of my inaugural lecture of the same title delivered on World AIDS day 2016 at Birkbeck College, University of London. It traces the emotional landscape of Britain at a key turning point in the history of AIDS in the UK. Drawing on a range of testimonial and other archives it explores the feelings at stake in the epidemic, how they related to press and politics, how they shaped everyday lives, and how they played …
Victorian Sexualities and After
The three papers gathered here were first delivered as a symposium, ‘Victorians and After’, at Birkbeck College, University of London, in November 2015. The event marked an exhibition on the nineteenth-century fallen woman at the Foundling Museum which was curated by Lynda Nead.1 The exhibition vividly showed the ways in which the fallen woman was mythologized in art and other media and also how women in their petitions to London's Foundling Hosp…
Queer Domesticities
Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotyp
At Home With Derek Jarman
Home is never only of the present. A sense of personal robustness and sometimes political resistance can emerge through a tacking back and forth between homes past and present—especially for those who felt and feel socially or culturally marginalized. We see this vividly in the way the filmmaker Derek Jarman created his home and garden at Prospect Cottage at Dungeness on the Kent coast in the context of his failing health. In this piece I show ho…
Sonya O Rose, What is Gender History
Queer 1950s
Leading sexuality scholars explore queer lives and cultures in the first full post-war decade through an array of sources and a range of perspectives. Drawing out the particularities of queer cultures
Domestic Passions
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Desire
Families of Choice? George Ives, Queer Lives and the Family in Early Twentieth‐Century Britain
This article argues that the stark post‐Second World War understanding in which ‘straight is to gay’ came to be seen as ‘family is to non family’ has tended to obscure the historical complexity of family life and the ways in which queer men have interacted with and created their families in the past, and used the language of family to conceptualise emotional bonds ‘beyond blood’. Using the well‐heeled early campaigner for homosexual law reform, G…
Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870–1914
A New City of Friends
Homosexuality was repeatedly aligned during the later nineteenth century with a series of urban 'types' and spaces, and also with a range of anxieties about the modern metropolis - about degeneration, decadence, excessive consumption and sexual excess, for example. Those attempting to legitimize homosexuality could not wholly sidestep this rhetoric and the insistent urban connection. There was a need to imagine ways of being in the city which all…
Current status of reproductive behaviour in Africa
The current annual population growth rate of 3.2% in Africa will double the population by the year 2025. The majority of this population is below 15 years of age, and Africa concurrently also has the highest incidence of infertility in the world. Sexual behaviour, which has been poorly studied in Africa, has a direct impact on reproductive health [including fertility, infertility and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)]. The multiple cultures an…
Aids, Mass Observation, and the Fate of the Permissive Turn
Archives of Feeling
This piece is an extended version of my inaugural lecture of the same title delivered on World AIDS day 2016 at Birkbeck College, University of London. It traces the emotional landscape of Britain at a key turning point in the history of AIDS in the UK. Drawing on a range of testimonial and other archives it explores the feelings at stake in the epidemic, how they related to press and politics, how they shaped everyday lives, and how they played …
Families of Choice? George Ives, Queer Lives and the Family in Early Twentieth‐Century Britain
This article argues that the stark post‐Second World War understanding in which ‘straight is to gay’ came to be seen as ‘family is to non family’ has tended to obscure the historical complexity of family life and the ways in which queer men have interacted with and created their families in the past, and used the language of family to conceptualise emotional bonds ‘beyond blood’. Using the well‐heeled early campaigner for homosexual law reform, G…
Local Matters
This article compares queer social scenes in the 1960s in three English towns and cities: Brighton and Plymouth on the south coast and Manchester in the northwest. It considers how queer experience in these places was affected by local identities, demographics, geographies, and socioeconomic circumstances and so demonstrates how and why the local matters to queer scenes and lives, even in the midst of wider burgeoning mass and connective cultures…
Domestic Passions
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Current status of reproductive behaviour in Africa
The current annual population growth rate of 3.2% in Africa will double the population by the year 2025. The majority of this population is below 15 years of age, and Africa concurrently also has the highest incidence of infertility in the world. Sexual behaviour, which has been poorly studied in Africa, has a direct impact on reproductive health [including fertility, infertility and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)]. The multiple cultures an…
A New City of Friends
Homosexuality was repeatedly aligned during the later nineteenth century with a series of urban 'types' and spaces, and also with a range of anxieties about the modern metropolis - about degeneration, decadence, excessive consumption and sexual excess, for example. Those attempting to legitimize homosexuality could not wholly sidestep this rhetoric and the insistent urban connection. There was a need to imagine ways of being in the city which all…
Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870–1914
Families of Choice? George Ives, Queer Lives and the Family in Early Twentieth‐Century Britain
This article argues that the stark post‐Second World War understanding in which ‘straight is to gay’ came to be seen as ‘family is to non family’ has tended to obscure the historical complexity of family life and the ways in which queer men have interacted with and created their families in the past, and used the language of family to conceptualise emotional bonds ‘beyond blood’. Using the well‐heeled early campaigner for homosexual law reform, G…
Desire
Queer 1950s
Leading sexuality scholars explore queer lives and cultures in the first full post-war decade through an array of sources and a range of perspectives. Drawing out the particularities of queer cultures
Domestic Passions
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Sonya O Rose, What is Gender History
Queer Domesticities
Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotyp
At Home With Derek Jarman
Home is never only of the present. A sense of personal robustness and sometimes political resistance can emerge through a tacking back and forth between homes past and present—especially for those who felt and feel socially or culturally marginalized. We see this vividly in the way the filmmaker Derek Jarman created his home and garden at Prospect Cottage at Dungeness on the Kent coast in the context of his failing health. In this piece I show ho…
Victorian Sexualities and After
The three papers gathered here were first delivered as a symposium, ‘Victorians and After’, at Birkbeck College, University of London, in November 2015. The event marked an exhibition on the nineteenth-century fallen woman at the Foundling Museum which was curated by Lynda Nead.1 The exhibition vividly showed the ways in which the fallen woman was mythologized in art and other media and also how women in their petitions to London's Foundling Hosp…
Sex Lives and Diary Writing
This chapter explores the interplay of the different voices, modes of self understanding and methods of self narration in the diary, and shows how Ives&s;s longing for cogency and coherence is mired by multiplicity and complexity, indicating a deeply conflicted sense of self. George Ives, the early campaigner for homosexual law reform, is reticent about his sex life in his diary for the 1890s and early 1900s. Sex, Margaretta Jolly observes, is &s…
Unnamed Desires
Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History / Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–1945: Queer Identities in the Second World War." Australian Historical Studies, 48(1), pp. 132–133
Aids, Mass Observation, and the Fate of the Permissive Turn
Archives of Feeling
This piece is an extended version of my inaugural lecture of the same title delivered on World AIDS day 2016 at Birkbeck College, University of London. It traces the emotional landscape of Britain at a key turning point in the history of AIDS in the UK. Drawing on a range of testimonial and other archives it explores the feelings at stake in the epidemic, how they related to press and politics, how they shaped everyday lives, and how they played …
Local turns
This piece presents one strand of new research from “Queer Beyond London” (QBL), a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project which ran from 2016 to 2018 and sought out the significance of locality to queer identities and communities in the period 1965–2015 via case studies of Brighton, Leeds, Manchester, and Plymouth. The project is part of a (re)turn to the local in queer historical work, and here I review that shift before exemplif…
Queering the Interior
Local Matters
This article compares queer social scenes in the 1960s in three English towns and cities: Brighton and Plymouth on the south coast and Manchester in the northwest. It considers how queer experience in these places was affected by local identities, demographics, geographies, and socioeconomic circumstances and so demonstrates how and why the local matters to queer scenes and lives, even in the midst of wider burgeoning mass and connective cultures…
Co-researching with primary school students to retrace their digital footprint
Young children are extensively datafied today even from before birth where families may share information about them or allow them to use digital technologies at a very young age. Schools typically collect children's data for compliance and to construct a set of norms and deviance in predicting risks and educational outcomes, often without children's knowledge and consent. Yet, children's understanding of their digital footprints is limited by th…
Sociology (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · History (12 works) · Art (9 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Queer (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (6 works)