Hanne Blank, also known as Hanne Blank Boyd, is an American historian, writer, and editor. Her written works include Virgin: The Untouched History, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, and The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts.
Biography
Hanne Blank was born in Northampton, Massachusetts to a Jewish family. and grew up in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area. Later becoming a classically trained musician and then a formally educated historian. As a musician, she was a Fellow of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute and was the 1991 recipient of the George Whitefield Chadwick medal for work as a proponent of contemporary art music.
She began writing erotica at age 17, and published the zine Zaftig! while a doctoral student at Brandeis University. Her first book, Big Big Love: A Sourcebook for People of Size and Those Who Love Them, was published by Greenery Press. After writing and editing several books of erotic fiction, she became an editor of Scarletletters.com, a website featuring erotic writing for a female audience by female authors, and a related website Scarleteen, focused on sex education, which were both owned by Heather Corinna. In 2003, her book Unruly Appetites was published by Seal Press.
As an independent scholar, she was a 2004-2005 Scholar of the Institute For Teaching and Research on Women at Towson University, Maryland.
She is a former associate editor of Sojourner: The Women's Forum, and has also written sex columns for The Boston Phoenix and Good Vibes Magazine. As an instructor (prior to becoming a full-time writer/editor), she taught at the university level at Brandeis University, Tufts University and Whitworth College.
In 2012, she published Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, which begins with her own life experience and then explores a history of late 19th and early 20th century construction of the concept of sexuality. In 2012, she also published The Unapologetic Fat Girl’s Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts, and explained in an interview with Curve, "Moving your body for your own reasons, taking pleasure in moving your body, is incendiary for fat women because fat women's bodies aren't seen as deserving of that care, that attention, or that freedom to move and take up space in the world."
Selected works
Fiction
Zaftig: Well-Rounded Erotica. Cleis Press, 2001. Shameless: Women's Intimate Erotica. Seal Press, 2002.
Unruly Appetites. Seal Press, 2003.
Non-fiction
Big, Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them. Greenery Press, 2000. Virgin: The Untouched History. Bloomsbury USA, 2007. Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Beacon, 2012.
"FAT" in Object Lessons Bloomsbury, USA 2020, isbn 978 1-5013-3328-6
Critical reception
Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them
In a 2001 review for the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, Martha Cornog writes, "Blank starts out by debunking the cultural truism in America that sex and fat don't mix." The revised edition, published in 2011, was reviewed by Sheila Addison in Fat Studies.
Virgin: The Untouched History
In a 2007 review for The New York Times, Alex Kuczynski describes Virgin: The Untouched History as "quite a different animal" from Blank's past work as an erotica author and editor, and "A well-researched history of virginity, it veers from the medical (who knew there are five different types of hymens?) to the pop-cultural (discussions of "Beverly Hills 90210," the movie "Little Darlings" and so on) to the scholarly (dissections of Christian theology, 19th-century British social policy and the like)." A review from Publishers Weekly states, "Blank, an independent scholar, has pieced together a history of how humans have constructed the idea of virginity (almost always female and heterosexual) and engineered its uses to suit cultural and political forces."