An Intimate History of Postcolonial England: Sexual and Reproductive Health in Three English Cities
This talk navigates between three English cities in order to tell a new, intimate history of postcolonial Britain through the sexual and reproductive health and healthcare of its citizens.
It begins in Southampton, the port city on the south coast of England which was so often the first point of arrival on the British mainland for commonwealth migrants to the UK. For those who chose Southampton as their home, the city became a theatre of racialisation, often animated by questions of reproductive health and childbirth.
Having explored these themes, we move to Bradford in the industrial north. By the 1970s, Bradford had become well known for its ethnic diversity, making it a flash point in debates about race, ‘integration’ and the state of postcolonial British society. It was also home to the Bourn Hall Fertility Clinic where invitro fertilisation (IVF) was pioneered. These factors collided in the early 1980s when the world’s first ‘Black test tube twins’ were born to a Black Jamaican father and South Asian mother in Bradford. Their experience reveals the ways in which questions of race featured in press coverage and debates around reproductive technologies, and point towards enduring racist anxieties.
Finally, the talk turns to Leicester in the English east midlands. In this ‘super diverse’ city, responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic took particularly innovative forms. In particular, public health workers in Leicester pioneered efforts to reach Black and South Asian men who were being overlooked by conventional AIDS campaigns. Taken together, these case studies begin to reveal the place of sexual and reproductive health in the history of postcolonial Britain and suggests that, by focusing on these intimate, embodied histories, we gain a new and distinct view of that history.
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