New Books in Gender

Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Duke University Press, 2013) treats IVF as a looking-glass in which can see not only ourselves, but also transformations in modern notions of biology, technolog...

In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military power of the general, the intellect and control of the Confucian gentleman, the rationality of the modern scientist. In Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China (University of California, 2013), Marc L. Moskowitz considers these aspects of Weiqi, treating the gam...

In her previous book, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), Deborah Cohen took us into the homes of Britons and examined their relation to their habitat and its artifacts from 1830 onwards. In her new book, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.f...

Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Science Association. Her new book, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Praeger Press, 2012), draws on al...

Kristin A. Goss is author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press 2013). She is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Goss challenges the conventional wisdom about women’s group with new congressional hearing data. Rather than ebbing-and-flowing like waves, Goss suggests...

Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, however, have long ignored them. Enlightenment philosophers used descriptions of powerful women in the French court to mock the monarchy. Nineteenth-century historians propagated myths about these histori...

If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s. It represented a breakthrough moment for women in sports, a symbol of the progress women were making to finally receive something like equality of opportunity and resources in athletics. F...

There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degree, casually combative. For biography has long been a genre wherein story-telling is disproportionately devoted to cradle-to-grave narratives about the lives of white men. It’s also a field wherein there persists a notion that there are things one, as a...

Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexuality, and race played in the far-right ideologies of the 1930s. Re-reading the work and ideas of a group of male intellectuals known as the Jeune Droite or “Young New Right,” Sanos argues that aesthetics...

In our fast-paced world, it is easy to move from one crisis to another. Conflicts loom in rapid succession, problems demand solutions (or at least analysis) and impending disasters require a response. It is all we can do to pay attention to the present moment. Lingering on the consequences of the past seems to take too much of our finite attention. Jennie Burnet‘s fantastic new book Genocide Lives...

How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives to trial records, congressional investigation files to films and novels, popular weeklies and dailies to postcards, advertisements to confession ma...

A couple of years ago I was living in a hip district of a university town in the Midwest. It had all the hip stuff you’d expect: a record store (and I mean record store), a big used bookstore, a greasy spoon, two dive bars, a coffee shop, and two... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the twentieth century, most answers to this question were rather unsatisfying, unless of course you like your answers religio-mythical or pseudo-scientific. Then scientists discovered a genetic difference th...

Ken MacLeish offers an ethnographic look at daily lives and the true costs borne by soldiers, their families, and communities, in his new book Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013). His intimate exploration of military lives makes salient the numerous and often contradictory ways that war enters into the everyday lives of soldiers...

In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Generation,” as opposed to lesser generations, I suppose. Now most of the Americans of “The Greatest Generation” who fought in “The Good War” were men. What made them the “greatest” was that they had proved...

David Bleich‘s book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013) is described as a wide-ranging critique of academic practice, which is almost an understatement. From the point of view of someone working in linguistics as (at least in principle) a scientific discipline, his thesis is interesting and provocative. He argues forcefully for the rele...

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on wom...

Pretty much every day you can read an article–usually somewhat intemperate–about how women can or can’t “have it all.” Rarely, however, do you read anything about the way in which men try to balance work and family. The assumption seems to be that fathers either: a) don’t want to “balance” anything; or b)say they want to “balance” work and family but actually don’t, or don’t try very hard to bring...

The maps drawn up by early settlers to plot their inexorable expansion were not the first representations of North American space. Colonialism does not simply impose a new reality, after all, but attempts to shatter and discard whole systems of understanding. Indigenous maps preceded the colonial encounter and indigenous maps persist is this extended colonial moment. In Mark My Words: Native Women...

Here at New Books in Psychoanalysis we are celebrating the Summer of Men! We continue our inquiry into the topic of masculinity in psychoanalytic thought as we converse with Robert Grossmark and Bruce Reis about Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory (Routledge, 2009). The book is devoted to rethinking notions of male heterosexuality from within a p...

The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so many things- and also one of the pleasures of reading it: the fact that a biography can reveal something not simply about another person, but also pr...

Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon are authors of Women and Congressional Elections: A Century of Change (Lynne Rienner, 2012). Palmer is associate professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University and Dixon is professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. They have combined to write a deeply informative book about the trajectory of women in congress. The book offers man...

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician...

Beverly Bossler‘s new book will be required reading for anyone interested in women and gender in China’s history. Covering nearly five centuries of transformations, it also offers a fascinating rethinking of the histories of neo-Confucian thought, of commercialization, and of the family in China. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity(Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2013) explores tra...

In her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010), Stacy Alaimo approaches the concepts of “science, environment, and self” in an extremely novel and inventive way. The central concept in Alaimo’s work is that of “trans-corporeality” which she describes as a way of theorizing the relationship between humanity and the world at large as not bei...