New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Lisa Biggs, "The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation" (Ohio State UP, 2022) Jan 16, 2023

Show notes

Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies that mandate incarceration for nonviolent offenses and criminalize what women do to survive interpersonal and state violence. In The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation(Ohio State UP, 2022), Lisa Biggs reveals how four ensembles of currently and formerly incarcerated women and their collaborating artists use theater and performance to challenge harmful policies and popular discourses that justify locking up "bad" women.

Focusing on prison-based arts programs in the US and South Africa, Biggs illustrates how Black feminist cultural traditions--theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, humor, and protest--enable women to investigate the root causes of crime and refute dominant narratives about incarcerated women. In doing so, the arts initiatives that she writes about encourage individual and collective healing, a process of repair that exceeds state definitions of rehabilitation. These case studies offer powerful examples of how the labor of incarcerated Black women artists--some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society--radically extends our knowledge of prison arts programs and our understanding of what is required to resolve human conflicts and protect women's lives.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Jan 16, 2023

Show notes

“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.

Marlene Schäfers is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. You may find some of the songs mentioned in the book and the episode here.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022) Jan 15, 2023

Show notes

In The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia(Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty.

The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.

Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in:

David Reeve, To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham
Lynette J. Chua, The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life
Anjalee Cohen, Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and Sticking Out

Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Kaiama L. Glover, "A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being" (Duke UP, 2021) Jan 13, 2023

Show notes

In A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being(Duke UP, 2021), Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of theorization.

Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Heidi K. Gardner and Ivan A. Matviak, "Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work" (HBR Press, 2022) Jan 12, 2023

Show notes

Today I talked to Dr. Heidi K. Gardner about her new book (co-authored with Ivan A. Matviak) Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work(HBR Press, 2022)

Diversity doesn’t mean much if a range of people are in the room but not really a part of the conversation taking place there. To counter that all-together too frequent shortcoming, today’s guest has focused on a variety of ways to achieve better collaboration where multiple viewpoints enrich the outcome. One way is to understand seven key dimensions of collaboration that focus on the personalities and behavioral tendencies in that room. Are people given to being risk seekers or spotters, for instance? Do they tend to be complex or concrete thinkers? And so on. Another way forward is to understand how the team will be evaluated and rewarded. When pay and promotions are weighted such that 40% is dependent on the outcome for customers, you tend to get a broader, more altruistic vantage point. Underlying it all in this conversation is how to overcome homophily: the basic human tendency to form connections with people most like yourself, thereby (unconsciously) excluding those who may look, dress, talk, think and feel in ways outside of your natural comfort zone.

Dr. Heidi K. Gardner is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and a consultant at McKinsey & Co. Named by Thinkers50 as a Next Generation Business Guru, she has lived and worked on four continents and holds a PhD from London Business School.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Zen Chaplaincy, Activism, and Scholarship Jan 09, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Pierce Salguero sits down with Wakoh Shannon Hickey, who is a Soto Zen priest, hospice chaplain, scholar, and activist. She talks about her early experiences with social violence in the 1980s, her work as a hospital chaplain, and her 2019 book Mind Cure, which is a groundbreaking social history of religion and mindfulness in the U.S.

Resources:

Find all episodes of the Blue Beryl Podcast here.

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Daniel White, "Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety" (Stanford UP, 2022) Jan 07, 2023

Show notes

In Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety(Stanford UP, 2022), Daniel White draws on extensive fieldwork in government ministries and government-adjacent organizations to explore Japan’s current “politics of anxiety,” the ways in which state administrators have transformed anxieties about Japan’s global geopolitical status into future-oriented programs of national branding and revitalization based on a narrowly defined vision of pop-culture as synecdoche and savior. Examining the so-called “Cool Japan” soft-power strategy and policymaking decisions to nominate anime favorite Doraemon as a cultural ambassador and icons of young women’s culture as “Ambassadors of Cute,” White shows that the anxieties driving Japan’s administrators are disseminated into the culture broadly. He also pays close attention to the gender politics of these campaigns and the instrumentalization of women as agents of national branding and soft-power politics.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Ellen Cassedy, "Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie" (Chicago Review Press, 2022) Jan 06, 2023

Show notes

Today I talked to Ellen Cassedy about her new book Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie (Chicago Review Press, 2022).

Many people may identify 9 to 5 with the comic film starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin or perhaps only know Parton’s hit song that served as its theme. But 9 to 5 wasn't just a comic film—it was a movement built by Ellen Cassedy and her friends. Ten office workers in Boston started out sitting in a circle and sharing the problems they encountered on the job. In a few short years, they had built a nationwide movement that united people of diverse races, classes, and ages. They took on the corporate titans. They leafleted and filed lawsuits and started a woman-led union. They won millions of dollars in back pay and helped make sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination illegal. The women office workers who rose up to win rights and respect on the job transformed workplaces throughout America. And along the way came Dolly Parton's toe-tapping song and a hit movie inspired by their work. Working 9 to 5 is a lively, informative, firsthand account packed with practical organizing lore that will embolden anyone striving for fair treatment.

Ellen Cassedy was a founder of the 9 to 5 organization in 1973. She is the coauthor with Karen Nussbaum of 9 to 5: The Working Woman's Guide to Office Survival and with Ellen Bravo of The 9 to 5 Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment. Ellen Cassedy is a former columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, was a speechwriter in the Clinton administration, and has contributed to Huffington Post, Redbook, Woman's Day, Hadassah, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Rebecca Binns, "Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avant-Garde" (Manchester UP, 2022) Jan 02, 2023

Show notes

Rebecca Binn's Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avante Garde(Manchester University Press, 2022) is the first book-length work dedicated to the life and career of Vaucher. As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known. She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern indie legends the Charlatans, among others. More recently, her work was recognized the day after Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, when the front page of the Daily Mirror ran her 1989 painting Oh America, which shows the Statue of Liberty, head in hands. This is the first book to critically assess an extensive range of Vaucher's work. It examines her unique position connecting avant-garde art movements, counterculture, punk and even contemporary street art. While Vaucher rejects all 'isms', her work offers a unique take on the history of feminist art. The book explores how her life has shaped her output, with particular focus on the open-house collective at Dial House in Essex, a centre for radical creativity.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022) Jan 01, 2023

Show notes

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America(UNC Press, 2022) documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before.

Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected