New Books in Gender

This week on International Horizons, Ellen Chesler interviews Rebecca Adami and Fatima Sator, editor and co-author of Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights (Routledge, 2022) that debunks the myth that the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were Western male-dominated inventions. Moreover, the authors discuss how women did not act as a unified b...

In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry, Ke Li advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal...

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2023) is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary...

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal fo...

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and fi...

Today’s book is: Engage in Public Scholarship: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, by Dr. Alex D. Ketchum. Public scholarship—sharing research with audiences outside of academic settings—has become increasingly necessary to counter the rise of misinformation, fill gaps from cuts to traditional media, and increase the reach of important scholarship. Engaging in these efforts often...

To fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and practices from around the world. By the 1880s, this included the introduction of Western-derived psychiatry and its ideas about mental illness. The first Japanese psychiatrists claimed that mental illnesses required medical treatment in specialized ins...

This volume collects the private letters and published epistles of English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650-1700). It includes the correspondences of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the interlocutors of some of the best-known intellectuals of their era, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, H...

Scientist Alfred Kinsey tried to differentiate human sexualities on a seven-point scale. In so doing, he brought us the basics of bisexuality. But the scale leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of a spectrum, Special Guest Kate Sisk leads us into a gay fog. GUEST Kate Sisk (she/they/he) is a professional stand up comedian, amateur drag king, and co-host of the award-winning podcast, We’re Having Ga...

Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body. In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Co...

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Beatrice Zani, author of the book Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions, published by Routledge in 2021. The two scholars chat about novel ethnographic methods, such as itinerant ethnography and digital ethnography, solidarity between migrant women, the role of emotions in research. This episod...

Although refugee camps are established to accommodate, protect, and assist those fleeing from violent conflict and persecution, life often remains difficult there. Building on empirical research with refugees in a Ugandan camp, Ulrike Krause offers nuanced insights into violence, humanitarian protection, gender relations, and coping of refugees who mainly escaped the conflicts in the Democratic Re...

Who built the twentieth century birth control movement? In Women's Medicine: Family Planning and British Female Doctors in Transnational Perspective, 1920-70 (Manchester University Press 2020), Dr. Caroline Rusterholz highlights British female doctors' key contribution to the production and circulation of scientific knowledge around contraception, family planning and sexual disorders between 1920-...

Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19: Displacements and Disruptions (Routledge, 2022) bears witness to our displacements, disruptions, and distress as tenured faculty, faculty on temporary contracts, graduate students, and people connected to academia during COVID-19. The authors document their experiences arising within academia and beyond it, gathering narratives from across the glo...

In Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Ohio State UP, 2022), Charlie Samuelson casts queerness in medieval French texts about courtly love in a new light by bringing together for the first time two exemplary genres: high medieval verse romance, associated with the towering figure of Chrétien de Troyes, and late medieval dits, primarily associated with Guillau...

Garret Johnson works with Courage, the Catholic apostolate for people experience same-sex attractions. He describes his experience living the gay lifestyle and responds to my interview with Father Jim Martin, SJ, author of Building a Bridge, and several things Fr Jim said in that conversation that Garrett disagrees with. This is—please be warned—an honest, raw, and redeeming discussion about sex,...

'How do gender constructions transform religious experiences?' 'What is the role of bodily materiality in ethics and epistemology?' 'How does rethinking gender and sexuality force us to reconceptualise settled ontological frameworks?' The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (Bloomsbury, 2019) provides the first research resource to Indian philosophical gender issues, explo...

The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (U California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five...

How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black male "problem"? This is the guiding paradox of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (U California Press, 2022), an in-depth examination of graduates of Morehouse College, the nation's only historically Black college for men. While Black male collegians are often culturally fetishized for "beating the odds...

Amrita De talks about affective masculinities, aspirational linkages with dominant scripts of masculinities, socially organized. As she expands her work beyond her study of South Asian masculinities, she talks about how understanding and loosening these linkages entails crucial feminist work. She also talks about Shah Rukh Khan. Amrita De is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Center of Humanities and In...

Today we are joined by Frankie de la Cretaz, a sports journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sport and gender, and one of the authors alongside Lyndsey D’Arcangelo of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League (Bold Type Books, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of women’s gridiron football in the United States’ the reason why so many wo...

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. In this comprehensive biogra...

Victorine Elizabeth du Pont, the first child of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and his wife Sophie, was seven years old when her family emigrated to America, where her father established the humble beginnings of what would become a corporate giant. Through correspondence with friends and relatives from the ages of eight to sixty-eight, Victorine unwittingly chronicled the first sixty years of the du Pon...

Shannon Philip's book Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells the gendered story of a changing India through the lives of its young middle class men. Through time spent ethnographically 'hanging-out' with young men in gyms, bars, clubs, trains and gay cruising grounds in India, this book critically reveals Indian...

An exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory, Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh (Temple University Press, 2022) examines contemporary, woman-centered Muktijuddho cinema--features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Elora Chowdhury shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscrib...