Rudolph, Anne, Post Doc

By Katherine Harrison on 30 Jun | 0 comments

GEXcel project: 

My contribution to GEXcel builds on my doctoral research exploring what happens if a variety of discourses of female-to-female transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are read alongside each other. Through bringing new empirical data into dialogue with questions of shifting epistemologies and ontologies, my research takes a step back from seeking the ‘truth’ about STI transmission between women. Instead of pursuing definite answers to the questions commonly posed to the issue of female-to-female STI transmission, I argue that the questions themselves need to be carefully unpacked and critically interrogated. Through an engagement with current feminist and queer theorising on bodies, sexualities, identities and risk, my research partakes in conversations on the fluidity and fixing of thought and matter. Through using Foucauldian discourse analysis and by drawing on feminist contributions to Science and Technology Studies, it brings together a set of issues that are oftentimes not taken centre stage in sexual health research and practice. The examples discussed in my thesis are drawn from sexual health policy, from safer sex educational materials, and from focus groups and semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews conducted with young lesbian and bisexual women and with health and health-related professionals from various backgrounds in England. The thesis reflects on a series of issues implicated in the practices of talking and knowing (safer) sex and points to a number of questions that are relevant for health research, policy and practice. The concluding part of the thesis engages with the problematics of heteronormative conceptualisations of citizenship.

Biographical notes:

My interests include feminist, lesbian and queer theorising of sexualities, sexual and gender identities, theorisations of embodiment, health and illness, ‘race’, whiteness, migration and colonialism, the labour market, human rights and violence against women. Most recently I have been completing a PhD at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster University while also working as a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. With Dr Sahra Gibbon at UCL I have been working on an interdisciplinary research project examining the interface between genetic admixture, ancestry and breast cancer in Brazil. Prior to embarking on my PhD research I worked in various women’s and gender projects in Germany, Paraguay and Chile.