New Books in Gender

Why are women's friendships so deep yet so fragile? Friendship coach and educator Danielle Bayard Jackson unpacks the latest research about women's cooperation and communication, while sharing practical strategies to preserve and strengthen these relationships. Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women's Relationships (Hachette, 2024) is one part textboo...

The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political movements that tore through the 1960s and 1970s. In Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes (University of Rochester Press, 2023), Monica A. Hershberger considers the main female characters in four operas written in the 1950...

How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence. Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum (NYU Press, 2024) examines h...

Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity: The H...

Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy. D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She was the Editor of and essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018) a collection of poems, short prose and fiction...

What queens would England have had if firstborn daughters, not firstborn sons, had inherited the throne? In Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been (The History Press, 2024), Emily Murdoch Perkins investigates. We may think of princesses as dutiful and elegant, wearing long flowing dresses, but the eldest daughters of England’s kings have been very different. Political intriguers. Abducted nuns who...

Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy's The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom. When Nancy Reddy had her first child, she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately...

An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal prod...

At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams...

Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story, differences between the sexes are shaped by past evolutionary pressures―women are more cautious and parenting-focused, while men seek status to attract more mates. In each succeeding generation, sex hormones and male and female brains are thought to...

The early twentieth century was a particularly tumultuous time in Chinese history, complete with new conflicts, new technologies, and — as Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China: Redefining Female Identity through Modern Design and Lifestyle (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) shows — new ways to represent women.  Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China by Sandy Ng looks...

We are survivors. We were subjected to dehumanizing practices by people who sought our erasure. We believe telling our stories is both powerful and political. Shame Sex Attraction: Survivors' Stories of Conversion Therapy (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2025) is an edited collection that brings together the experiences of those who have been subjected to queer conversion therapy - it is an effort to...

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years,...

Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at Villanova University and Editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Two of her previous books include Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (2000), which is about the understudied rol...

Lisa Doggett, MD, MPH is a family and lifestyle medicine physician and an award-winning author based in Austin, Texas. In 2009, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. At that time, her daughters were 2 and 4 years old, and she was the director of a clinic for people without private health insurance. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease of the central nervous system (brain and spinal co...

Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) gives us the life of a women’s rights activist, labor lawyer, radical pacifist, writer and co-founder of what became the Civil Liberties Union. Her life was shaped by ke...

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biologi...

In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces? Drawing from...

New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative.  In Blue: A His...

Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Routledge, 2024) explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide...

In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale UP, 2024), Sara Lodge tells stories of women who brought 19th century criminals to justice, in real life and popular culture, as unacknowledged crime-fighters and feminist icons.  On stage and in fiction, women detectives were sensational figures who fascinated the public with cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroines who captured thieves...

Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms in the 1970s and 1980s. These spheres encompassed activists in the ūman ribu (women’s liberation) movement, members of the rezubian (lesbia...

Applying the "influencer" concept to the study of religion, Gurus, Priestesses, Saints, Mediums and Yoginis: Holy Women as Influencers in Hindu Culture (MDPI, 2024) explores the varieties of strategies that holy women use for gaining and expressing power in diverse roles. It examines different concepts of holiness and leadership for men and women, the role of charisma, and the arenas of activity a...

In How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory (Duke UP, 2024), Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize...

In Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Duke UP, 2024), Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind...