Professor Emma Rees

Research Interests

My 2013 book, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, was described in the Independent on Sunday as ‘the book you’ve been waiting for […] Although Rees is an academic by trade, the book gleefully mixes highbrow and lowbrow, from Chaucer to 21st-century horror’.  I have been writing about gender, representation and culture for well over twenty years, and I’m steeped in reading about feminism. I have delivered my talk, ‘Vulvanomics’, based on my book, The Vagina, at more than 30 venues and events on both sides of the Atlantic, and I host the biennial international, interdisciplinary Talking Bodies conferences at Chester.

Latest / Proudest Achievement

I host the international, interdisciplinary Talking Bodies conference at Chester every two years. Delegates come from all over the world to talk about gender, identity, and embodiment. The most recent conference was in April 2019 when, over four days, over 100 speakers presented research on body-related topics including religion, sexual identity, body modifications, disability, and representation in popular culture.

Subjects discussed include #metoo; FGM; the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people coming out; raising an awareness of sexual and gender diversity in the midwifery curriculum; representations of female characters in video games; using writing on the female body (and T-shirts) to combat sexism; whether drag is the ‘new punk’; the ‘coming out’ of mutants in the X-Men films; representations of the older woman in the TV series Grace and Frankie; and how women are represented on dress patterns.

Delegates attended from countries around the world, including Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, and the USA.

I’m proud to make Chester the centre for this unique biennial event which creates dialogues between people from diverse backgrounds who want to talk about bodies.

Further information

• Talking Bodies: https://www1.chester.ac.uk/institute-gender-studies/talking-bodies-2019-conference and https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319637778
• The Vagina: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-vagina-a-literary-and-cultural-history-9781628922127/