New Books in Gender

Most scholars and members of the public believe the process of enslavement was confined to the Western Hemispheric plantation or other locations of enslavement. Sowande Mustakeem’s award-winning Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016) disrupts that narrative. Mustakeem changes how readers understand the packaging process for how African...

Kate Manne is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. She specializes in moral and social philosophy and feminist philosophy. her new book is titled Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford 2018). The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Support our show by bec...

Muslim women are often the focus of debate when it comes to public conversations about Islam. Much of this centers on feelings and assumptions surrounding an object, the veil. Rafia Zakaria, journalist and author, unravels the complex nexus of attitudes, policies, and histories revolving around this object in her fascinating new book, Veil (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). She demonstrates how the obje...

On Second Thought: Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community, and Purpose (University of Utah Press, 2017) is a collection of thirteen essays by women, all in the second half of their lives, in which they contemplate the ways in which the different facets of their identities—personal, professional and spiritual—have hitherto unfolded and intertwined. Among their number is the folklorist, ethn...

Why are you still single? This question is often asked of single women, especially those who are deemed by loved ones or friends to be too old to be single. In her newest book, A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time (Manchester University Press, 2017), Kinneret Lahad analyzes this undertheorized aspect of the gendered experience. Singlehood is inextricably linked to a p...

Marie Grace Brown’s Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017) is in many ways a history of fashion in Sudan, but in so many ways, its much more than that. It is the story of women in Sudan, as well as the story of their bodies and movement. Brown weaves together women’s education, women’s health, activism and more through the tobe, a popular,...

In 1976, the landmark supreme court case Estelle v. Gamble, established that under the Eighth Amendment “deliberate indifference” to the health needs of incarcerated individuals was tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. Now, jails and prisons are one of the rare places in the contemporary U.S. where healthcare is deemed a right and not a privilege. In her new ethnography Jailcare: Finding th...

Thanks to Scott Straus, Leanne Fujii and others, we know quite a bit about how men behaved during the genocide in Rwanda. But we know surprisingly little about women’s actions during that crisis. Sara Brown begins to remedy this in her excellent new study Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Rescuers and Perpetrators (Routledge, 2017). Sara spent months interviewing Rwandan women. The result is...

J. Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor in the English Department at George Mason University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. In an hour-long conversation, we discuss her new book Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). New England has long presented an idealized se...

In her new book, Beyond the Silver Screen: A History of Women, Filmmaking and Film Culture in Australia, 1920-1990 (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Mary Tomsic, an ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Melbourne, explores the history of women’s engagement with filmmaking and film culture in Australia. From early women in film, like Lottie Lyell, to feminist filmmakers of...

Fashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 300+ eye-opening pages to it. Defining it as, not a history, but “a history of several lived presents.” Largely focusing on Turkey, Western Europe, and North America, Lewis walks us through the landscape...

The recent spate of revelations about high-profile sexual predators who have been harassing and assaulting women, sometimes for decades, along with the #MeToo campaign, have drawn renewed attention to the pernicious problem of discrimination in the workplace. We speak about these issues with Suja Thomas, whose new book, with co-author Sandra Sperino, shows us how (male) judges have invented an ent...

Katherine Paugh‘s new book The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the crucial role that reproduction took in the evolution of slavery in the British Caribbean. Using plantation records, Paugh reconstructs the life and work routine of Doll, an enslaved midwife tasked with delivering children on a Barbadian estate....

Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating and protesting sexual violence. Jean-Charles emphasizes a transnational black feminist framework that makes a critical intervention in rape cultural criticism. She contends in this work that taking rape...

The meaning assigned to architecture is complex and varied. Urban architecture is often stripped of meaning when people abandon the neighborhoods or are absent of meaning at the time of their inception. This leaves the people who inhabit the terrain to assign their own meaning to the architecture. Jeffrey Kidder, the author of Parkour and the City: Risk, Masculinity, and Meaning in a Postmodern Sp...

Claudia Leeb’s new book, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject (Oxford University Press, 2017), takes up pressing issues within contemporary political and feminist theory, especially as we consider the point of action and the instance of movement. This book marries together important questions within political theory, feminist theory, and economics w...

Laura Lee’s Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (Amberley Publishing, 2017) offers a detailed investigation of a conflict involving the writer and his two friends with whom he maintained sexual relations, Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert Ross. In her endeavor to disclose the root of the conflict that, as a matter of fact, marked and instigated Oscar Wilde’s decline, Laura Lee attempts...

Andrea L. Turpin is an Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. Her book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917 (Cornell University Press, 2017), begins with the early institutions of higher learning and the contest over the idea of separate and unique education. She examines the gender history of both private and state c...

What are your impressions when you think of the flapper? Who is she in your mind? When and where does she exist? In her new book Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper (Reaktion Books, 2017), Linda Simon tracks the historical narrative surrounding the flapper from the late-nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century. Using sources from popular culture and from people of th...

Why do we have sex-segregated restrooms? Are they necessary? What about your drivers license? Have you thought of why your designated sex category is listed, despite your picture and all other relevant information present? Heath Fogg Davis, in his new book Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? (New York University Press, 2017) , argues that these policies are not only unnecessary but harmful to achiev...

Recent popular and scholarly interest has highlighted the complex and brutal system of mass incarceration in the United States. Much of this interest has focused on recent developments while other scholars have revealed the connections between the development of the prison system after Reconstruction and the legacies of slavery. In her new book, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of...

In this podcast I talk with Tracy A. Thomas about her book Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law (New York University Press, 2016). Professor Thomas is the John F. Seiberling Chair of Constitutional Law and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at the University of Akron School of Law. She is also editor of the Gender and the Law Prof Blog. Support our show by becom...

How do women experience and participate in Metal? This question forms the core of Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), the new book from Rosemary Lucy Hill, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Leeds. Hill’s book is both empirically detailed, drawing on analysis of Metal media, and theoretically rich, engaging with a range...

Freudian theory laid the foundation for a felicitous engagement of psychoanalysis with transgender experience. Building on the work of sexologists, Freud not only posited a universal bisexuality, thereby implying that we are all transgender in our unconscious, but also indexed something in sexuality that exceeds our grasp. His most controversial claim, perhaps, was that human sexuality itself is f...

What is the labor for Black soldiers of the regiment? That is the question Johari Jabir asks in his book Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army” (Ohio State University Press, 2017). Conjuring Freedom analyzes the songs of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of Black soldiers who met nightly in the performance of the ring shout the counterclockwise song,...