New Books in Gender

In her new book, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017), Professor Sarah Imhoff explores the relationship between American identity and American Jewish depictions and definitions of masculinity. Professor Imhoff examines Jewish communal efforts to consciously create an American Jewish masculinity — one that is tied to the land, modeled on Protestant delimit...

In her book, Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather: The Era of the Australian Airline Hostess (University of Western Australia Press, 2017), Prudence Black, a Research Associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, explores the history of the airline hostess profession. From the early days of the 1930s until the 1980s, when airline hostesses became “flight att...

If you’ve been hospitalized in Europe, North America, Australia or the Middle East in recent years, chances are that at some point a nurse from the Philippines has had some part in your treatment. As Megha Amrith writes in the introduction to Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia (NIAS Press, 2017), Filipinos today comprise one of the largest global diasporas of medical workers, w...

Readers will want to grab a cocktail and charcuterie board when they sit down to read Richard E. Ocejo‘s new book, Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017). Ocejo explores the performance of culture through food and drink choices as well as the rejection of mass production in craft jobs. Working in the field, Ocejo provides readers with a glimpse into...

Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of such a view when applied to understanding how Britain responded to the growing aggressiveness of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. By highlighting the activit...

When the film was released in 1987, critic Roger Ebert famously panned Dirty Dancing. Yet the movie continues to be the favorite of millions of fans. In Deconstructing Dirty Dancing (Zero Books, 2017), Stephen Lee Naish reviews the movie scene-by-scene, parsing the reasons why it remains such a popular film. He returns to the NBN to chat with Joel Tscherne. Support our show by becoming a premium m...

In From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), historian Jennifer Le Zotte examines the movement of selling secondhand goods for profit and charity. Focusing on thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales, Le Zotte traces the history of selling used goods and clothing, from its questionable start to becoming a mult...

Jeanette Jouili‘s fascinating new book Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2015) navigates practices and challenges of living pious ethical lives in inhospitable conditions. Through a finely textured analysis of quotidian practices of piety among conservative Muslim women in France and Germany, this book offers a nuanced and an...

Psychoanalysis has a reputation for insularity, often limiting its interest and scope to events in the consulting room. But the origins of Freud’s notion of free speech bear meaningful similarities to the Founding Fathers’ conception of free speech, sparking curiosity about how psychoanalysis and democracy might speak to one another. In her recent book, Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Vo...

Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson‘s, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a broad interrogation of the way that public opinion is formed (or reformed) and activated, and specifically focuses on what transpired over the past fifteen years that shifted attitudes around the issue of LGBT rights. Grounded in multiple dimensions...

As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons (CavanKerry Press, 2013), White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty...

Were women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? Marcia Yonemoto‘s new book explores these questions in a compelling study that brings together the public discourse on women in the Tokugawa period (including prescriptive literature, instruction manuals for women, representations of women in fiction and drama, woodblock prin...

Carrie Jenkins‘ new book is a model for what public philosophy can be. Beautifully written, thoughtful, and compellingly and carefully argued, What Love Is: And What it Could Be (Basic Books, 2017) invites us to think openly and critically about romantic love: what it is, what it could be, and why it is crucial for us to ask these questions and come to our own answers. Engaging the work of bell ho...

When America went to war against Germany in 1917, the scale of the conflict required the mobilization of women as well as men in order to achieve victory. In The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Lynn Dumenil describes the many ways in which women participated in the war effort and the ways in which it transformed their lives. As she...

Rhiannon Graybill‘s Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible, revealing the male body as a source of persistent difficulty for the Hebrew prophets. Drawing together key moments in prophetic embodiment, Graybill demonstrates that the prophetic body is a queer body, and its v...

“Hookup” has become a buzzword, a misleading concept for students, parents and educators alike–one that confuses more than explains the nuances of this complex and pervasive trend. In American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (W. W. Norton, 2017), Lisa Wade analyzes its cultural roots: the evolution of courtship, our unrealized feminist revolution, America’s new business model of higher ed...

Caterina Corner lived a life that was composed of a mixture of adventure, power, and tragedy. The daughter of a Venetian patrician and merchant, she was married to the king of Cyprus while barely a teenager. Within two years of voyaging to her new home in 1472, she became a mother, a widow, and the ruler of Cyprus, over which she reigned until she was dethroned by her Venetian benefactors in 1489....

Five charismatic women navigate uneven terrain of racial gender and class stereotypes: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Halle Berry. The quintet charisma, as explored by Dr. Mia Mask in Divas on The Screen: Black Women in American Film (University of Illinois Press, 2009), range from erotic and a phallic idol of perversity and sexuality to comedic, cathartic and cap...

How did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Marie Hicks, an Assistant Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology, offers a detailed and compreh...

Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternative to the development of allopathic orthodoxy in the twentieth-century United States. By following Naturopathy from its nineteenth-century origins in the popular health movement through debates in the 1970s, Cayleff sheds light on an enduring critique of...

The wish to transcend one’s mortality, and the anxiety associated with being unable to do so, are universal human experiences. People deal with these in their idiosyncratic ways, often by transgressing rules and boundaries that serve as the parameters of civilized human coexistence. Technological advances expand our capacities for transcending our limitations, especially when they allow us to obje...

The prowess of the Roman empire was imbued with courage and militarism. Symbolised by the combative male soldier, Michael Edward Stewart‘s tool of historical enquiry is masculinity. In his book, The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas in the Early Byzantine Empire (Kismet Press, 2016), Stewart explores whether theological constructions of manhood as ascetic and pacifist changed the...

As I write this, the women’s basketball team for the University of Connecticut is in the midst of a 107 game winning streak. It’s quite reasonable to assert that Geno Auriemma will end his career as the most successful coach in basketball history. In the excitement of setting so many records, many people don’t remember a world where women’s basketball at the university level was, at best, an after...

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives. Instead, Hobson uncovers the gay and lesbian left, whose activists saw sexual liberation as intertwined with challenging racism, militarism, and imperial...

In an activist application of her scholarly discipline, Dr Liz Conor’s Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWA Publishing, 2016) acknowledges its dual potential to disturb and to incite a reckoning – giving life to Audre Lorde’s famous quote that the learning process is something to be incited, like a riot. Using travelogues, cartoon strips, missionary diaries, paintings and lithog...