Erin Maglaque's 'Presence'
Historian Erin Maglaque joins the podcast to talk about her new book 'Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body'
By LARB Radio HourJuly 31, 2026
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Erin Maglaque's 'Presence'
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Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to historian Erin Maglaque about Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which interrogates contemporary notions of how women’s bodies work.
The book is both a personal account as well as an excavation of the rituals, beliefs, and experiences of women from pre-modernity. It covers everything from pregnancy and child-birth to abortion, sexual desire, work, and sleep. Maglaque contrasts the idea of our bodies as separate from our minds—both optimizable and containable—with a pre-Cartesian conception of them as porous, vulnerable, and infinitely complex, inviting a consideration of some of the freedom of the deeper past and its starkly different ways of being embodied.
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LARB Contributor
The LARB Radio Hour is hosted by Eric Newman, Medaya Ocher, and Kate Wolf.