Skip to main content
BLOC
  1. BLOC
  2. Events
  3. Items

SUBTEXTS: Reporting Sex w' Izabella Scott & Rosa Campbell

When: Monday, April 13, 2026, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: BLOC Cinema, Mile End

Speaker: Izabella Scott & Rosa Campbell

alt=

With readings and book signings from Izabella Scott on her new book, The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial (Atlantic Books, 2026).

In The Bed Trick, Izabella Scott unfolds the case of Miss X v Gayle Newland - two former best friends who faced each other in court at a sex offence trial, first in 2015 and then again in 2017. Miss X claimed she was tricked into queer sex, many times, by a best friend pretending to be her boyfriend. But that friend, Gayle Newland, told a different story. In her new book, Scott unfolds the riveting story of Newland’s trials whilst also revealing the malleability of courtroom narratives, and the many myths, archetypes and stories embedded in the law.

In The Book that Taught The World to Orgasm and the Disappeared: Shere Hits and The Hite Report, Rosa Campbell explores the complicated life and literacy legacy of Shere Hite, who, despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, is little known and little read. Hite’s groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionized the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?

Rosa Campbell is a writer and historian based in London. She works on the global history of feminism and is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King's College London and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Beyond academia, she writes often for a public audience and works with museums and galleries. She is the author of the forthcoming The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report out this spring with Melville House in the US/UK and New South in Australia/NZ. Here is a preorder link. More about Rosa and her work at rosa-campbell.com.  

Izabella Scott is a writer and researcher from London. Her new book, The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial (Atlantic Books, 2026) follows a set of queer criminal trials, to trace how courts interpret intimacy, deception and consent. She is the co-author, with Skye Arundhati Thomas, of Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir (MACK, 2024), which was joint winner of the 2025 Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing. She completed a PhD at Queen Mary in 2025. She was formerly co-editor of The White Review. More about her work at https://izabellascott.com/

Back to top