New Books in Gender

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an award-winning historian and associate professor in American studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (W. W. Norton, 2020) offers a fascinating biography of a little-known suffrage leader. Gardner began life as Alice Chenoweth. Moving away from her family, she changed her name to create a...

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen's new book The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 20...

Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder have a new book that builds on their previous work exploring women and suffrage in the United States, Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2016). A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage (Cambridge University Press, 2020), arriving as we mark the 100th anniversary of th...

Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) by Jin Y. Park, professor of philosophy and religion at American university, is an account of the Korean Buddhist nun, Kim Iryŏp’s life and philosophy, which takes place from 1896-1971. Park eclectically references philosophers, feminists, and Buddhists from a variety of traditions as the context for th...

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight...

Jessica Wilkerson, Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, discusses her book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and the recent history of feminist social justice activism in Appalachia. Launched in 1964, the War on Poverty quickly took aim at the coalfields of s...

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen years old on a bet. The novel spawned two centuries of creatures that turn against their makers. It examines the limits of scientific innovation, whether the quest for knowledge must be tempered by morality, and why human beings tend to ostracize, persecute and sometimes kill anything that does no...

The 9/11 attacks fundamentally transformed how the US approached terrorism, and led to the unprecedented expansion of counterterrorism strategies, policies, and practices. While the analysis of these developments is rich and vast, there remains a significant void. The diverse actors contributing to counterterrorism increasingly consider, engage and impact women as agents, partners, and targets of...

Eunuchs. Nobody liked them, everybody seems to have hated them, but, even so, they were an essential part of many states – even in the Qing. Norman A. Kutcher's book Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule (University of California Press, 2018) looks at these little-acknowledged eunuchs, focusing on how the first Qing emperors managed their eunuchs, and in turn what their various manageme...

Relying on Carl Jung’s theory of the complex, as well as the archetypal narratives of the Greek character Pan, Sukey Fontelieu’s The Archetypal Pan in America: Hypermasculinity and Terror (Routledge, 2018) seeks to examine a collection of social and political traumas, both personal and collective. The book examines the development of our personal and social identities in psychoanalytic terms, as w...

Today Dennis Baron talks about his new book What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She (Liveright, 2020). Baron is professor emeritus in English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has written many books about language and its connection to culture. What’s Your Pronoun addresses an important cultural question about women’s rights and the rights and identities of non-binary people, and re...

In her new book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Melissa Kravetz examines how German women physicians gained a foothold in the medical profession during the Weimar and Nazi periods, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany reveals the continuity in rhetoric, strategy, and tactics of female doctors who wo...

Professors Melissa Walker of Converse College and Giselle Roberts of Australia’s La Trobe University, editors of the Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South series, discuss the field of documentary editing and how the personal writings of southern women reveal the broader history of life in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenst...

How did Catholic mysticism shape politics and religion in 20th-century Germany? What do seers, stigmatics, and Marian apparitions reveal about broader cultural trends? Michael O’Sullivan’s award winning new book examines how longing for the divine paradoxically drove secularism. In Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 (University of Toronto Press, 2...

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen (Yale University Press, 2019), acclaimed historian of 18th-century French history and the biographer of Louis XVI, John Hardman redresses the balanc...

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest. Grass wants us to see something like the true history of the land and the culture from which the Midwest arose, one built on systemic racism, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. At...

What can online social spaces like Reddit’s r/gaming reveal about gender attitudes, masculinized spaces, and turning points in gamer communities? In their new book Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community (Palgrave Pivot, 2019), Marcus Maloney, Steven Roberts, and Timothy Graham utilize computational and qualitative methods to explore conversations happing on the...

The idea of the seductive sex robot is the stuff of myth, legend and science fiction. From the ancient Greeks to twenty-first century movies, robots in human form have captured our imagination, our hopes and our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real and fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics. Artificial intelligence raises very...

Christian imagery, symbols, and motifs have long been used and incorporated in fashion. Famous designers such as Coco Chanel, Gianni Versace, and Dolce and Gabbana have made Christianity trendy and fashionable. But there is a history that precedes the seemingly recent fusion of Christianity and fashion. Lynn Neal traces this history in Religion in Vogue: Christianity and Fashion in America (NYU Pr...

Erika Engstrom is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her latest book, Feminism, Gender, and Politics in NBC’s Parks and Recreation (Peter Lang, 2017), analyzes the various ways the series presented feminism as a positive force, such as the satirical portrayal of patriarchy; alternative depictions of masculinity; the feminist ideology and political career of...

The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power surrounding and undergirding data. The impacts of the creation, use, collection, and aggregation of data are such that individuals from various communities face disparate, negative impacts. In their new book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, Catherine D’Ignaz...

In her book, Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sher Banu Khan provides a rare and empirically rich view of queenship in early modern maritime Southeast Asia. Four women ruled the Muslim realm of Aceh in succession during the second half of the seventeenth century. Their reign – with the acquiescence of the religious elite in the...

In her new book Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society (AK Press 2019), sociologist and storyteller Kimberly Dark considers what it means to look a certain way. Integrating memoir with cultural critique, Dark describes her experience navigating the world as a fat, queer, white-privileged, gender-conforming, eventually disabled, and inevitably aging “girl with a pretty fac...

The history of women's political involvement has focused heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century women engaged in grassroots activism when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines h...

Franny Choi’s book-length collection of poetry, Soft Science (Alice James Books 2019), explores queer, Asian American femininity through the lens of robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence. As she notes in this interview, “this book is a study of softness,” exploring feeling, vulnerability, and desire. How can you be tender and still survive in a hard and violent world? What does it mean to h...