New Books in Gender

In this episode, we meet Dr. Jill Massino, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina who is fascinated researching everyday life under dictatorships. We discuss her first book Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn, 2020). This book which is based on more than one hundred oral histories and extensive w...

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspi...

Based on detailed ethnographic research, this book explores the varied experiences of women who have converted to Buddhism in contemporary Britain and analyses the implications of their experiences for understanding the translation and transference of Buddhist practices temporally and geographically. Caroline Starkey's Women in British Buddhism: Commitment, Connection, Community (Routledge, 2019)...

Steven M. Ortiz’ new book The Sport Marriage: Women Who Make It Work (University of Illinois Press, 2020) offers an in-depth analysis of and perceive insight into what is means to be an athlete’s wife in a male-dominated institution of professional sports. Ortiz draws from three decades of research that focuses on the experience of women who are married to male professional athletes. He found that...

Koritha Mitchell, Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, has written a complex, interdisciplinary, and important analysis focusing on black women as the lens to explore the intersection of racism and sexism and the strategies that black women have used to persevere and succeed, over 400 years, in the United States. Mitchell’s expertise in American literature and culture is es...

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock. Though their unions were not legally recognized, slav...

In a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction of the African diaspora? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Zakkiyah Imam Jackson about the imaginative interventions of African cultural production into the r...

An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (Liveright, 2018) mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory d...

For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female. However, new research in neuroimaging suggests that this is little more than “neurotrash.” In Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020),...

Against the backdrop of four decades of continuous conflict in Afghanistan, the Pashtun male protagonists of this book carry out their daily effort to internally negotiate, adjust (if at all), and respond to the very strict cultural norms and rules of masculinity that their androcentric social environment enjoins on them. Yet, in a widespread context of war, displacement, relocation, and social vi...

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell UP, 2020), immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late...

Contemporary debates on “mansplaining” foreground the authority enjoyed by male speech, and highlight the way it projects listening as the responsibility of the dominated, and speech as the privilege of the dominant. What mansplaining denies systematically is the right of women to speak and be heard as much as men. Anway Mukhopadhyay, The Authority of Female Speech in Indian Goddess Traditions (Pa...

Born around 1820, Augusta Browne was a pianist, organist, composer, music pedagogue, entrepreneur, music critic, and writer. In Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2020), author Bonny Miller contextualizes the life and career of this remarkable woman who built a public career that at times seems at odds with her conservative C...

Studies on marriage migration often portray marriage migrants as victims of globalization and patriarchy. Although there are intersecting oppressions among female migrant workers, the tendency to conflate marriage migration with sex trafficking among humanitarian organizations and scholars lead to erasure of divergent experiences. In her book, Elusive Belonging: Marriage Immigrants and "Multicultu...

Ellen Wayland-Smith is an associate professor of writing at University of Southern California. Her book The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (University of Chicago Press, 2020) follows the career of adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub who in the mid-twentieth century created the advertising campaigns selling consumer products to the average American housewife....

Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex workers and American missionaries who moved from...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over three hundred young Jewish women from Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) fled their communities and sought refuge in a Kraków convent, where many converted to Catholicism. Relying on a wealth of archival documents, including court testimonies, letters, diaries, and press reports, in The Rebellion of the Daughte...

Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines—a place accessible from the nearest city, Juneau, only by boat or plane—isn’t the sleepy town that it appears to be: from a bitter debate...

Why are Americans, and American politicians more specifically, obsessed with sex? Why, in the words of Janet Jakobsen, are gender and sexuality such riveting public policy concerns the United States? In The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (NYU Press, 2020), Jakobsen answers this question by breaking apart the standard narrative that religion is primarily responsible...

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their chores—handling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motel-room toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms fro...

Alexandra J. Finley is the author of An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. An Intimate Economy examines the history of American slavery and capitalism by foregrounding women’s labor in the Antebellum slave trade. Finley explores a variety of topics included, domestic, reproductive, and sexual labo...

Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 2020) tells the unique story of a generation of artists, feminists, and queer activists who emerged in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With a focus on new media, Zychowicz demonstrates how contemporary artist collectives in Ukraine have contested Soviet and Western connota...

Rene Almeling’s new book GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (University of California Press, 2020) provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductive health and this knowledge gap shapes reproductive politics today. Over the past several centuries, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies....

In Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India's Religious Traditions (Oxford UP, 2013), Padma (Bowdoin College) focuses on two types of Gramadevatas or goddesses: deified women and those associated with disease and fertility. Setting these figures in the context of their Brahmanic transformation into popular goddesses and noting the interconnectedness of seemingly dis...

Queen of the Gangsters: Stories by Margie Harris (Off-Trail Publications, 2011), is the first anthology of work of crime fiction writer Margie Harris. Edited by John Locke, Queen of the Gangsters bring the work of Harris, the first woman hardboiled crime fiction writer in history, to a larger audience. During the height of the 1930s gangster pulps, Harris wrote some of the roughest, toughest stori...