New Books in Gender

This timely and telling analysis identifies the formal and thematic innovations pioneered by millennial feminists between 2012 and 2020 that have shaped the trajectory of our favorite shows today. Author Vincent L. Stephens offers close readings of nine pivotal series, including Girls, Orange Is the New Black, Broad City, Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Fleabag, Insecure, Shrill, and I May D...

Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Ben Jackson examines the material and consumer practices of over 1000 men from the middling and upper ranks of eighteenth-century society, c.1650-1850. It draws upon evidence from over 35 archives and museum collections to detail how material objects were integral for men in forming ident...

In Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (SAPP, 2023), Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban...

Embodying Normalcy: Women’s Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid work to embody the latest trends for the purpose of achieving success in neoliberal culture. Using TLC reality shows, lifestyle and beauty influencers, Brazilian butt lift TikToks, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian as her archive, Lucia Soriano delive...

Edinburgh's Unruly Women: Gender, Discipline, and Power, 1560-1660 (Routledge, 2024) examines experiences of church discipline across parish communities through Edinburgh and its environs. The book argues that experiences of discipline were not universal, varying according to any number of factors such as age, gender, marital status, and social rank. Adopting a case study approach, the book illumi...

Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy (University of Delaware Press, 2025) investigates the ever-evolving role of the widow in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—including Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesc...

What would a rodeo open to anyone and everyone look like? In their new book, Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo (U Washington, 2023), history professors Elyssa Ford (Northwest Missouri State) and Rebecca Scofield (University of Idaho) argue that the International Gay Rodeo Associaton (IGRA) provides a template. Founded in the 1970s as an alternative space that typically excluded LGBT...

As they compete in leagues around the world, elite women’s basketball players continually adjust to new cultures, rules, and contracts. Courtney M. Cox follows athletes, coaches, journalists, and advocates of women’s basketball as they pursue careers within the sport. Despite all attempts to contain them or prevent forward momentum, they circumvent expectations and open new possibilities within an...

Women's wars are not men's wars. This is the first lesson of Cynthias Enloe’s Twelve Feminist Lessons of War (U California Press, 2023): the lack of attention paid to women during war not only obscures their experiences but also prevents a full understanding of war and its effects. Wartime shapes women's lives and also the gendered politics of issues such as domestic relationships and childcare, l...

In today's post-Roe v. Wade world, U.S. maternal mortality is on the rise and laws regarding contraception, involuntary sterilization, access to reproductive health services, and criminalization of people who are gestating are changing by the minute. Today I’m joined by Dr. Caitlin Killian, the editor of and one of the contributors to a new book from Bloomsbury Academic, Understanding Reproduction...

How has the rise of digital platforms changed domestic labour? In The Return of the Housewife: Why Women Are Still Cleaning Up (Manchester UP, 2025), Emma Casey, a Reader in Sociology at the University of York, explores the rise of the ‘cleanfluencer’. Situating the way specific online discourses now valorise and glamourise housework, the book gets under the false promise of happiness that hides t...

The history of queer politics in the United States since 1968 is commonly narrated as either a progressive campaign for state recognition or as a subcultural rejection of prevailing gender norms. But these accounts miss the true scale of queer politics in the post-war era. By centering transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures in the history of sexual rebellion, Eros and Empire: The...

What does Islam, particularly Shīʿī Islam, really say about same-sex sexual relations? Can Islamic legal frameworks, rooted in centuries of jurisprudence, ever be used to imagine the possibility of an Islamically valid same-sex marriage? What terms and categories did pre-modern Islamic sources use to describe what we might now call “homosexuality,” and what is meant by the claim that “homosexualit...

Why are young men leaning right while young women shift left? Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones speak with NYU’s Scott Galloway, political analyst Sophie Stowers, and commentator Oliver Dean to explore the forces behind this growing divide. Whether it’s a broken social contract where young people no longer believe they will lead better, more prosperous lives than their parents or the wo...

In Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895. In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and,...

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced...

What does transphobic oppression have to do with sexism, heterosexism, and racism? How does a decolonial analysis help us understand trans oppression? How are the relatively recent concepts of person, self, and subject implicated in these forms of oppression? And what theorizations are already available within trans communities for thinking through this all?  In Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Tran...

Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we'll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.  In recent years, "white feminism" and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that...

Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Cold War Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2025) examines the shifting relationships among motherhood, peace activism, and women's rights in the decades following Japan's defeat in 1945. With a focus on the concept of bosei, generally understood to be the "motherly" qualities that are supposedly inherent to women, the book illuminates how popular...

How do we acquire knowledge about societies? Does how we acquire social knowledge shape what we know? How conscious must we be of our own experiences as we do our research? What does feminism add to our methods and modes of research? Now in its second edition, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) by Drs. Crista Craven an...

In Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (Hawaii 2024), Laura Miller examines the intersections of ludic capitalism with formal and informal religious practices and beliefs in contemporary Japan. Miller shows that women―often younger women―are the primary drivers of industries of religiously flavored entertainment that offer avenues of self-exploration and spiritual capital that are market...

Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies. Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health (NYU Press, 2025), by Dr. Wylin D. Wilson, addres...

In Menstrual Myth Busting: The Case of the Hormonal Female (Policy Press, 2025), Dr. Sally King interrogates the diagnostic label of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) to expose and challenge sexist assumptions within medical research and practice. She powerfully demonstrates how the concept of the ‘hormonal’ premenstrual woman is merely the latest iteration of the ‘hysterical’ female myth. By blaming th...

Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood (U Minnesota Press, 2025), exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant--of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing th...

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (U California Press, 2024) is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" kn...