the surprisingly short history of heterosexuality

Linda's book challenges a lot of those assumptions.

They gain weight because of the imbalance of inputs to outputs, and that our role as physiotherapists is to increase the outputs. The conventional wisdom is that fat people are lazy, overeat, and don't do enough exercise. Like most developing countries, New Zealand has its own issues with body size, and we wanted to get our students to grapple with some of the issues around largeness and activity. She lived in Auckland near to our physiotherapy school and we would bring her in to talk to the students about exercise for large people. (The book is out of print now, but you can still buy copies online.) Which reminded me of a similar book written by Linda Finn called ' Largely Happy '. I discovered that Blank had also published a book titled ' The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts '.

Still to this day, physiotherapy is a predominantly female profession. ' The professions' founders in the UK forebode men joining the profession and only massaged men under strict instruction of a referring doctor (and only then for 'nursing' cases). Journal of the Chartered Society of Massage and Medical Gymnastics, March, 229. The history of the Chartered Society of Massage and Medical Gymnastics. The founders of the Society of Trained Masseuses - the forerunner of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, and many other physiotherapy professional bodies around the world - were heavily 'gendered' in their early years, as Grafton made clear in 1934 - ' We will make massage a safe, clean and honourable profession, and it shall be a profession for British women’ Grafton, S.

Normative values around (hetero)sexuality were pivotal to the founders of physiotherapy. This was exactly the time when physiotherapy as a profession was being formalised. I realised that there are some surprising and interesting links between Hanne's work and the history of physiotherapy.įirstly, Blank reminds us that heterosexuality was a social construct invented to normalise sexuality at a time when late-Victorian anxieties imposed some now taken-for-granted, but no less draconian notions of 'normal' sexuality. I did some research into the writings of Hanne Blank, the author of 'Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Sexuality,' see this brief interview with Thomas Rogers at Salon.

The surprisingly short history of heterosexuality