 And I'm very pleased now to welcome our next finalist to the stage. Ashley Orr is from the A New College of Arts and Social Sciences and the title of Ashley's presentation tonight is Fleshing Out the Corset, A Novel Approach to Body Shaming. Vile. Disgusting. Offensive. A few weeks ago this image went viral and since then hundreds of abusive comments just like these have been leveled at both the professional photographer and the new mother in the photo. Now it's tempting to think that in the 21st century gender inequality is no longer an issue or that the musings of online trolls aren't a litmus test for our cultural attitudes. But how far, really, are these public acts of shaming from the 19th century obsession with policing women's bodies? The novels that I'm researching by little known feminist writers of the era would suggest that we haven't come that far at all. Would you believe that in Victorian England a pregnant woman who went without her corset or who defied the period of post-natal confinement would be socially vilified. Their bodies were made invisible and yet isn't that really exactly what's going on here? Please hide. You're making us uncomfortable. That is uncomfortable. This image makes us feel queasy, awkward, even self-conscious. But in the looking and in the reading we have the capacity to create real change. Now my research shows that the female body is just as tightly bound today as it was in the 19th century. All we've done is exchange one garment for a whole host of new technologies designed to govern the body. It's our cultural attitudes toward women that are sewing them into a virtual corset. But I don't want to stop there because my research into these forgotten novels does more than use the past to cast judgment upon the present. It reveals the ways in which their female characters challenge the society that seeks to confine them. And in so doing, they offer us a map, a course against which to chart our own progress so that their imaginings of an equal future can become our reality.