New Books in Gender

In Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838-1902 (U South Carolina Press, 2026), Dr. Mollie Barnes studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Dr. Barnes presents e...

Prior to the American Revolution, the urban centers of colonial North America had little direct experience of war. With the outbreak of violence, British forces occupied every major city, invading the most private of spaces: the home. By closely considering the dynamics of the household—how people moved within it, thought about it, and wielded power over it—The Home Front reveals the ways in which...

Wide ranging interview with Dr. Ronald L. Jackson II, Professor and Department Chair of Communication Studies, the University of Miami. Interview explores Dr. Jackson's pioneering scholarship in Black Masculinist Thought, its contribution to Black Studies, its intercultural conversations with Black Feminist Thought, the State of Black Men's Studies and its relationship to Black Women's Studies, it...

A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism (SUNY Press, 2026) by Dr. Kenna Neitch establishes persistence as a framework for understanding methods of feminist activism in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Blending literary and ethnographic approaches, Dr. Neitch analyzes texts produced by activist movements from the 1980s to 2020—from colle...

How did black suits become so ubiquitous? Why has men's business clothing been so plain for the last 250 years? How did a style adopted by the Founding Fathers to differentiate themselves from European contemporaries become the dominant style for men around the globe? Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026) traces the shift from the color...

The end of the fourteenth century was a time of upheaval and contested authority among the traditional institutions of medieval Europe. In response to these conditions, a number of people began to claim their own authority, as prophets speaking the word of God. They came from outside of the clerical elite and were mostly women and reformers. Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1...

What was life like for young people in twentieth century Britain? In We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026), Dr Laura Tisdall, a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University tells the story of this era through the eyes of children and young people, offering a radical reinterpretation of Britain’s Cold War age. The book offer...

Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors (Rutgers University Press, 2026) examines how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities. Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Dr. Janet Hinson Shope and Dr. Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone—almost a...

A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet...

This episode features a conversation with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder Equality Labs and author of The Trauma of Caste. We discussed her own coming to consciousness of caste as the child of Dalit parents who were “passing” and how her work as an organizer has involved sustained engagement with anticaste thought, Black feminism, and Indigenous epistemologies. The conversation then turned to the...

Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood.  Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsu...

How does coloniality shape the sociosomatic possibilities of our bodies? More importantly, how do gender-nonconforming people not only resist the limitations of that coloniality but also make, connect to, and revitalize other possibilities? How do displaced people use old and radical practices of embodiment to enact decolonial life now? In Sideways Selves: Travesti and Joetría Struggles Across the...

Published by Temple University Press in 2026, The Heartland of US Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest examines Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century. In it, Dr. Thomas Xavier Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle-class, heterosexual, and Christian is the...

Female artists have long employed collage to reflect the ways in which identity is often constructed from conflicting, contrasting and contradictory parts. Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage (Thames & Hudson and V&A Publishing, 2026) by Fiona Rogers explores the relationship between photography and feminist collage, foregrounding the use of femmage—a radical recla...

From Ghostbusters to Will & Grace, One Day at a Time to Jurassic Park, the past decade has seen Hollywood reach a new peak in its obsession with reboots, remakes, and revivals. Spearheaded by media giants like Disney and Netflix, these projects promise progress—more diverse casts, “timely” social commentary, and redemptive nostalgia—yet they often reproduce the very inequalities they claim to addr...

Hotels represent nations, hosting visiting monarchs, politicians, and diplomats. Hotels underpin global networks of travel and communication, on which national and international prosperity have increasingly depended since the end of the First World War. Yet hotels are also places where people can be anonymous; where murderers and thieves mix with adulterers and con artists; and where prejudice fin...

In the well-trod history of the Roman Empire, a pivotal moment has long gone unnoticed: It was in ancient Rome that medical men first set their sights on childbirth, the traditional domain of female midwives. Taking us to the dawn of Western obstetrics, A Womb of One's Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Tara Mulder offers a feminist account of how,...

Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel (Oxford UP, 2026) is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, revered as the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It traces the emergence and development of a rich body of narratives about Yeshe Tsogyel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,...

“Parental rights” is a rallying cry for today’s American conservatives, signaling opposition to mandatory vaccination and “woke” public school curricula. In Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2026), Dr. Julia Bowes traces the origins of the modern parental rights movement to the nineteenth century, when the introduction of compulsory sc...

Anarchist theory includes the belief in freedom for all - that no one person, nor group of people, should have power over any others; that individuals can best decide how to live (and love). In this presentation Elaine Leeder will discuss eight Jewish women who identified as anarchists, active during the 1920s to 1950s. Through analysis of in-depth interviews Leeder explores the complete sexual fr...

Can art change the contemporary world? In Feminism, Art, Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki, a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the university of Edinburgh, offers a Marxist Feminist perspective on a variety of issues in both society and the cultural sector. Engaging with a huge range of examples, as well as theorising key issues such as work and labour, the long modern, communing p...

Max Morris's Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era (Routledge, 2025) brings together feminist theory, media studies, and queer research methodologies to offer new, compelling insight the relationships between money, digital platforms, and sex. Through longstanding engagement with gay, queer, and bisexual men who do not describe themselves as sex...

Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era. In God Bless...

In Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences (Ohio State UP, 2026), Elena Foulis offers a practical guide for completing ethical fieldwork in Latina/o/e communities, emphasizing equitable and culturally sustaining practices for gathering oral histories. In her critical decolonial model, Foulis centers the agency of the people within these communities while considering th...

In this special student edition of High Theory, Andrew Bennett, Jo Hoffman, Kai North, and Ally Sullivan tell us about Rugged Individualism, a concept they link to Marxist theory. They made this episode for an assignment in Professor John Linstrom’s course on Theory and Criticism at Centenary College of Louisiana. The students provided the show notes below. The baby theorist pictured in the fetchi...