New Books in Gender

There is exactly one strong woman in the movie “The Godfather,” and she’s not Italian. (It’s “Kay Adams,” played by the least Italian-looking actress alive, Diane Keaton.) Such is the stereotype about Italian women, at least in the U.S. They are always in the background, sometimes cooking for la famiglia, sometimes counting rosary beads, sometimes simply missing (as in the case of “The Godfather”...

In August of 2009, the South African runner Caster Semenya won the 800 meter final in the world Championship leading by one minute. “Muscles bulging and triumphant hand aloft,” the news reported, “she crossed the line way ahead of the rest of the field and ran straight into accusations that she was far too strong, too fast and, to be blunt, too masculine to be a woman.” The International Associati...

With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions about seemingly basic categories like marriage, freedom, and sex. It also ma...

Cultural movements don’t exist in vacuums. Consciously or not, all movements borrow from, and sometimes reject, those that came before. In Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lexington Books, 2011), the first in a trilogy of books that cast a critical eye upon hip hop as a social and cultural movement, Reiland Rabaka traces the pre-history of hip ho...

Do social values belong in the sciences? Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more socially and politically engaged philosophy of science. Janet Kourany‘s book is a service to scholars and interested readers across the many fields of science studies, providing the reader with a set of models a...

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, they transformed Japan: what was a thoroughly traditional, quasi-feudal welter of agricultural estates became a modern industrial nation-state. Since the inspiration for these reforms came from the West (...

American women dominated the swimming competition at the London Olympics, earning a total of sixteen medals in seventeen events. This template of success was set already at the 1920 Games, the first Olympics in which American women swimmers competed. Women’s swimming races had been introduced in 1912 at Stockholm, but U.S. women had been barred from attending by their own country’s athletics offic...

Harkening out of the United State’s Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile made a big enough splash that their names and songs are still recognized by many rock fans. And those of us who do recognize these bands tend to link them to a larger artistic and musical genre known as Riot Grrrl. In Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Harper Perennial...

When I saw Nwando Achebe‘s book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011), I thought: “Really? A female king? Cool!” It turns out Ahebi Ugbabe was not only a female king, but also a female husband and father. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ahebi Ugbaba was born late in the nineteenth century in Igboland, in present-day Nigeria. She fled home to escape her...

Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match of the Women’s Champions League. In a pairing of the defending champion, Olympique Lyon, and the club that has won the most titles in the tournament’s 11-year history, FFC Frankfurt, the French side took...

Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, turn their backs to her. The girl is Abina, the men are “Important Men,” and together they grace the cover of of Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collabor...

When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how many children you can have – and they’re horrified. One thing I learned from reading Gail Hershatter‘s new book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Pr...

In Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Patricia Gherovici unpacks the ways in which hysteria, Lacanian-style, functions. Approaching her topic, transgenderism, from many angles, she takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the transgender turn is changing clinical thinking and practice. The person who comes into the consu...

“My mother was a saint.” ” In my time, we pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps.” “A man’s home is his castle.” “The home is the foundation of society.” These are just some of the romantic catchphrases that are commonly recited by those who claim that things just aren’t like they used to be in the “good old days.” In The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books,...

We’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All white, of course: African Americans would have to wait till the integration of the armed forces. But still, there’s a kind of earnest 1940s diversity in those movies: maybe a wide-eyed kid from the farm, a p...

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has allowed us to forget just how recently the issue of contraception was as fraught as the issue of abortion. And in any case, recent tussles over tee...

Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), Charlotte Witt found that most people answered that obviously they’d be different if their gender differed – even though many feminist philosopher friends considered gender essentialism to be false....

On the Minnesota rinks where I spent many days of my childhood, the skates made the man–or the boy, to be more accurate. Hockey skates had a boot of tough leather and a reinforced toe to protect against sticks and pucks, like work boots mounted on thick, sharp, rounded blades. In contrast, girls wore figure skates. The boots were made of softer leather, laced high up the ankle, with a tapered toe....

Here’s a study-guide prepared to accompany the interview. For as much as recent decades have witnessed a patriarchal backlash against the growing visibility of LGBTQ people in North American society, there is another, increasingly popular narrative embodied by Dan Savage’s ubiquitous internet promise: “It gets better.” As barriers to equal treatment under the law are removed and the state incorpor...

Tell me, who can resist a book called The Queer Art of Failure? Not me. Especially once I learned that its heroines are the likes of Ginger (of *Chicken Run*) and Dory (of *Finding Nemo*). Children – the intended audience of 3D animated blockbusters – are revolting little creatures, it turns out, happy to wreak havoc on prescribed gender roles, distinctions between humans and animals (or toys, for...

Jafari S. Allen‘s !Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press, 2011) is a meticulously researched and exquisitely theorized ethnography that begins with a queer speculation of the revolutionary inevitable. That is, the cover art to the book, a self-portrait of a the tuxedoed artist Rena Pena, engaging Tarot cards and other visionary practices, can be read as the s...

Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social liberalism while liberals shy away from her perceived advocacy of eugenics and her supposed socialist tendencies. Though she was a pivotal 20th century figure, Sanger’s own voice has been drowned out by the cacophony of controversy. As renown feminist hist...

Today, you can open your newspaper and find stories about mass rape in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, death sentences for adulterous women in Iran, or Central American women smuggled into the US for the purposes of sexual slavery. A few decades ago, such matters wouldn’t have ranked as “news”: they were just business as usual. As Pulitzer-prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof an...

When anthropologist Ellen Lewin gave a preliminary report on her research on gay fathers, a member of the audience asked how she could write about such “yucky people.” Yes, that’s the technical anthropological term for same-sex attracted men who parent children. But here’s the punch line: the questioner was not a homophobe who believes that gay men who wish to share their lives with children must...

Many of us know that Nazi regime tried to control Germans’ fertility: some people should reproduce more, according to the National Socialists, and some should reproduce less or not at all. Policies like coercive sterilization for the supposedly “unfit” were the flip side to benefits for “racially fit” Germans who propagated. But the fact is, many states the world over have tried to exert control o...