New Books in Gender

Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2026) examines the place of women in Soviet Russia from the 1917 Revolution through the post-World War II period, discussing how the Soviet construction of gender perpetuated inequality even as it dramatically expanded women’s roles in society. Chapters of this book explore Bolshevik activists’ ideals of women’s liberat...

How can we achieve lasting social and political equality for women? Dr. Leda Pérez tackles this thorny question in Searching for Democracy: Women, Domestic Work, and Social Reproduction in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) by interrogating egalitarianism in Latin America, where nearly 20% of women work in domestic service. She examines how women’s participation in society, labor,...

Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s....

Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "fi...

Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine (U Chicago Press, 2025) traces the emergence of trans medicine in Scandinavia in the twentieth century, exploring the construction and negotiation of medical expertise among medical professionals, patients, and activists in the media and government bureaucracy. The book combines the author’s analysis of medical records and other archival sou...

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Leah Kim about her powerful book, Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom Through Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2026).  A deeply personal examination of the dire state of our maternal and postpartum care for mothers. For expecting and new parents, too often the care is so focused on a healthy baby that the mother's p...

American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in movies, Broadway shows, books, music, and more, but somehow it’s only ever the stories of newsboys that are told. Scholarly literature too has focused mostly on boy newsies. Yet for nearly as long as...

A joke is never just a joke—not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850 (JHU Press, 2025) Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democr...

Between 1990 and 2020, women candidates won only 6% of the world’s presidential races. How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) explains the factors, strategies, and perceptions that help (or hinder) women to democratically access their country’s highest political office. Dr. Catherine Reyes-Housholder introduces a theory of gendered incentives and perc...

For years, LGBTQ+ policies worldwide have been crafted based on heteronormative views, needs, and practices. However, this has gradually changed over the last two decades as LGBTQ+ individuals have become key players in the development of gender-based policies. Diego Galego's Queering Public Policy: A Disruptive Yet Inclusive Framework for Policymaking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) examines these pol...

Our recent conversation about Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2026), with author Niharika Pandit, covers the journey of how critical methodology meets the weight of lived experience. This book examines the everyday politics of militarized control in Kashmir following the Indian government’s August 5, 2019, decision to de-opera...

In the 1970s, as women started to enter the labor force in unprecedented numbers, economists began to examine their roles as economic actors. The result was the rise of gender economics, now a major subfield with powerful data and new methods comparing the economic lives of men and women. Yet despite decades of progress, many of the most consequential questions about gender inequality remain unres...

Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leading up to the fall of the Roman Republic, Fulvia was moving in the most powerful social circles, and by her death in 40 BCE she had amassed a degree of political and military power unprecedented for a w...

Chapal Rani was one of India’s most famous performers of jatra, Bengal’s popular theater. Traditionally, all the roles, including female roles, were played by men—and Chapal Rani was perhaps the most prominent performer of women on the stage. He’s also the subject of a new book from Sandip Roy, titled Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Roy, who joins us the show today, tell...

The centerpiece of Melodrama as Provocateur (Duke UP, 2026) is an essay by Linda Williams (1946–2025). Williams was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her highly influential work reframed some of cinema’s most neglected or denigrated genres from a feminist perspective, including documentary, pornography, horror, and melodrama. Melodrama is t...

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press, 2026) talks with Yulia Gradskova and Ieva Bisigirskaitė, two of the three authors behind Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden. Together with Soheyla Yazdanpanah, they explore what nationalists mean by "good mothers," demographic anxiety, and maternal activism in Lithuania, Russia and Sweden. You can pu...

Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women’s draw of the 1977 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament, she and her tennis partner made it to...

Queer theory and reproductive justice need each other—now more than ever. As liberals and leftists increasingly frame reproductive justice in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, often adopting the language of “queerness,” it has become difficult to see that their political demands and strategies are often quite conservative. In Reproductive Justice, Queerly (U California Press, 2026), Carly Thomse...

A woman miscarries—and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administered—and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia—and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work—and is...

The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire.  In The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026)...

Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan's new edited volume Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family and Healing (U Regina Press, 2026) is a powerful anthology that brings together writers, activists, and scholars who meditate, reflect, and share stories of queer Muslim life, that contains the complexity of rage, grief and resilience but also joy, love, and healing. In the process, Thawer and Khan decons...

Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet. And it was through letters that she shared prose reflections–alternately humorous, provocative, affectionate, and philosophical–with her extensive community. While her letters often contain poems, and some letters consist entirely of a single poem, they also constitute a rich genre all their own. Through her correspondence, Dickinson appea...

The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton UP, 2025) is a critical look at the difficulties women face in the field of Jewish studies, drawing on quantitative data, personal stories, and the gendered history of the field. The field of Jewish studies has expanded significantly in recent years, with increasing numbers of women entering the field. These scholars have brought new...

Today I'm speaking with Steven K. Green, Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University. We are discussing his book, American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2026). Since the first permanent Protestant settlement in Jamestown in 1607, Protestant Christ...