New Books in Gender

In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row is the author of Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. A Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Prof...

In this interview, we speak with Dr. amina wadud about her latest book Once in a Lifetime (Kantara Press, 2022), a book that started out as a blog for her hajj journey back in 2012. Dr. amina wadud is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She earned her PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Michigan in 1988. Her other books are Qur’an and Wom...

In Gendering the GOP: Intraparty Politics and Republican Women's Representation in Congress (Oxford UP, 2022), Catherine N. Wineinger argues that to truly understand the evolution of women's congressional representation, it is necessary to move beyond an analysis of legislative behavior and toward an analysis of intraparty gender dynamics. Unlike previous research on women in Congress, Wineinger f...

In Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke UP, 2022), Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to th...

In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (U Minnesota Press, 2022) insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people w...

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments whe...

Today I talked to Elissa Bassist about her memoir Hysterical: A Memoir (Hachette, 2022) For two years author Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical specialists for pain that none of them managed to diagnose or resolve. Some of their treatments led to other medical problems but never relief. Then an acupuncturist suggested that she simply needed to take control of her voice, and Bassist was shocked...

Dawne Y. Curry’s Social Justice at Apartheid’s Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), which examines the role of African women in the conversation on nationalism during South Africa’s era of segregation, excavates female voices and brings them to the provocative fore. From 1910 to 1948, African women contributed to political thought as editor...

What if family were not the only place you might hope to feel safe, loved, cared for and accepted? What if we could do better than the family? We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-ca...

Hatred of Sex (U Nebraska Press, 2022) links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little mo...

In Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body (Duke UP, 2020), Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa...

Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately...

Alongside rapid socio-economic development, China has achieved remarkable gains in gender equality on metrics like health, education, and labor force participation. Yet, the glass ceiling phenomenon and the underrepresentation of women in management has worsened. Sisi Sung's The Economics of Gender in China (Routledge, 2022) develops a cross-disciplinary paradigm, with economics at its core, to be...

Laureline Latour founded Women In Art Magazine in July 2022 from a desire to bring together artists from different countries. She studied German and Russian ab initio at Oxford University. Women In Art Magazine's teams are based between Oxford, London, Paris and beyond. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Support our show by becoming a premium...

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian vie...

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her (Duke UP, 2022) Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the prese...

Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route; African-American women in search of freedom from slavery; Chinese sex-workers sold openly on the docks of San Francisco; Native American women brutally displaced by...

Richard Petts' Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers (Routledge, 2022) focuses on issues of family, work, and gender, with a focus on gender inequality. Women are disadvantaged in both paid and domestic work, due in large part to being primarily responsible for duties within the domestic sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these ineq...

How do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience of feminist women who are sci-fi fans. The book shows their commitments to being both...

It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and come with their own artefacts and subcultures. Peter Rehberg’s book Hipster Porn: Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine 'Butt' (Routledge, 2022) looks at one such source artefa...

Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings Institution, 2022). The statistics are stunning. Men have a 9% lower graduation rate from college. One in three men without a completed high school education are now out of the workforce. About 40% of births take place outside of marri...

In Chingona: Owning Your Inner Badass for Healing and Justice (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Mexican American activist, scholar, and podcast host Alma Zaragoza-Petty helps us claim our inner chingona, a Spanish term for badass woman. For all the brown women the world has tried to conquer, badassery can be an asset, especially when we face personal and collective trauma. Working for change while preservi...

In Rebels, Scholars, Explorers: Women in Vertebrate Paleontology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), Professors Annalisa Berta and Susan Turner uncover the rich legacy of women in the field of vertebrate paleontology from the eighteenth century until today. Through a series of biographies arranged both chronologically and geographically, the book offers a most welcome historical overview of th...

Not long ago, same-sex couples had to jump through endless hoops to make their relationships even close to legal. Happily, those days are over. But here's the rub: many gay and lesbian couples, accustomed to living off-grid, are so thrilled to have the benefits of marriage that they jump into it without fully considering the consequences. In Before I Do: A Legal Guide to Marriage, Gay and Otherwis...

The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial.  In Just Get On the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics (University of California Press, 2021), a keenly researched and incis...