New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Rebecca Ingram, "Women's Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) Dec 16, 2022

Show notes

Sandie Holguín (Professor of History and Coeditor of the Journal of Women’s History, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Rebecca Ingram (Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures, University of San Diego) about her book, Women’s Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain(Vanderbilt University Press, 2022).

Today Spain is widely known for its culinary achievements, drawing tourists from around the world to sample delights from Michelin-starred restaurants. But in the early twentieth century, visitors to Spain complained unceasingly about the poor, primitive qualities of Spanish food and its preparation. To Spanish intellectuals, this denigrated place of Spanish food within the European pantheon of “civilized” cuisines seemed misplaced, and they set about to correct this mischaracterization. It is during this period of Spain’s great imperial losses and uneven economic modernization that Ingram enters to analyze the place of culinary writing in Spain’s modernization process. Ingram dives deeply into the culinary writings of Spanish feminists like Emilia Pardo Bazán and Carmen de Burgos, and the decidedly-not-feminist polymath physician, Gregorio Marañón’, and she examines the culinary training ground for working-class women at Barcelona’s Institut de Cultura i Biblioteca Popular de la Dona. Through her deep reading of culinary paratexts, she elucidates the numerous debates around women’s labor and domesticity and its relationship to Spanish modernity. Ingram reveals "how culinary writing engaged these debates and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor—the kitchen—and, in this way, shaped their thinking."

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Beverley Chalmers, "Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust" (Grosvenor House, 2020) Dec 15, 2022

Show notes

Beverley Chalmers's book Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust (Grosvenor House, 2020) exposes a taboo aspect of Holocaust history; the sexual abuse of children. Children were sexually assaulted in ghettos, camps, on transit trains, while in hiding, and even when sent to supposed safety outside Europe. The Nazi’s genocidal brutality facilitated the abuse of children, in addition to targeting them for murder. In addition, children were sexually assaulted by some rescuers and peers who took advantage of their vulnerability. After the war, they were again betrayed by those who discounted their experiences, and by Holocaust scholars who refuse to acknowledge their stories or give credence to their memories.

Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University.

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Ying-Chen Peng, "Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi's Image Making" (Yale UP, 2023) Dec 15, 2022

Show notes

Ying-chen Peng’s Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making is a beautiful new volume on late Qing imperial art practice from Yale University Press (forthcoming in 2023). Peng’s book, rigorously researched and richly illustrated, presents a revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager through an analysis of her patronage and participation in making art. Each chapter follows Cixi’s her “artfully subversive” command of various media forms, from photography and portraiture, to architecture, porcelain, painting, and calligraphy. Considering Cixi as a patron and artist in her own right, Peng frames the regent as a canny political and aesthetic strategist who worked within and against conventions that circumscribed female power to craft an assertive role as the face of the Great Qing Empire at a moment of immense historical changes. Join us for a fascinating discussion of the artistic universe crafted by Cixi.

Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

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Amanda Wangwright, "The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949)" (Brill, 2020) Dec 14, 2022

Show notes

The first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949)(Brill, 2020) , authored by Amanda Wangwright, recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten force in China's modern art world. Through its detailed examination of the lives and careers of six female artists—Guan Zilan, Qiu Ti, Pan Yuliang, Fang Junbi, Yu Feng, and Liang Baibo—this book argues that women were central to the emergence of modernist art in early twentieth-century China and to the nation’s larger modernization project. Amanda S. Wangwright’s analysis of a wealth of primary sources demonstrates how these women constructed public personas, negotiated space within art societies, applied feminist thought to their artistic praxis, and surmounted obstacles to their careers—wielding art as the “golden key” to professional advancement and gender equality.

Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology.

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Nicholas de Villiers, "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang" (U Minnesota Press, 2022) Dec 14, 2022

Show notes

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang(U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.

Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.

Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.

Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary.

Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

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Avgi Saketopoulou, "Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia" (NYU Press, 2023) Dec 13, 2022

Show notes

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.

Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the strange in ourselves, not to master trauma but to rub up against it, can open us up to encounters with opacity. The book concludes by theorizing currents of sadism that, when pursued ethically, can animate unique forms of interpersonal and social care.

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Natasha Lasky, "Britney Spears's Blackout" (Bloomsbury, 2022) Dec 11, 2022

Show notes

Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst of her public breakdown, she managed to record an album, Blackout. Critics thought it spelled the end for Britney Spears' career.

But Blackout turned out to be one of the most influential albums of the aughts. It not only brought glitchy digital noise and dubstep into the Top 40, but also transformed Britney into a new kind of pop star, one who shrugged off mainstream ubiquity for the devotion of smaller groups of fans who worshipped her idiosyncratic sound.

Britney Spears’s Blackout (Bloomsbury, 2022) returns to the grimy clubs and paparazzi hangouts of LA in the 2000s as well as the blogs and forums of the early internet to show how Blackout was a crucial hinge between twentieth and twenty-first-century pop.

Natasha Lasky is a writer and filmmaker living in Chicago, USA.

Natasha on Instagram.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley on Twitter.

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Iván Sandoval-Cervantes, "Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration" (U Texas Press, 2022) Dec 10, 2022

Show notes

Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration(U Texas Press, 2022), documents a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is global in character, motivated by foreign affairs and international economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its cross-border analog.

Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to fight the US-instigated “war on drugs" or else leave their fields to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes discovers that migrants' experiences dramatically alter their conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. And some migrants bring their revised views with them when they return home, influencing their families and community of origin. Comparing Oaxacans moving within Mexico to those living along the US West Coast, Sandoval-Cervantes clearly demonstrates the multiplicity of answers to the question, “Who is a migrant?"

Iván Sandoval-Cervantes is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. You can find him on Twitter @IvanAntropologo

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

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Inna Perheentupa, "Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia: An Ethnography of Resistance and Resources" (Policy Press, 2022) Dec 08, 2022

Show notes

Inna Perheentupa's book Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia: An Ethnography of Resistance and Resources(Policy Press, 2022) is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the politically turbulent 2010s. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the author illustrates how a new generation of activists chose feminism as their main political beacon, and how they negotiated the challenges of authoritarian and conservative trends. As we witness a backlash against feminism on a global scale with the rise of neoconservative governments, this highly relevant book decentres Western theory and concepts of feminism and social movements, offering significant insights into how resistance can mobilize and invent creative tactics to cope with an increasingly repressed space for independent political action.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Jasmine Calver, "Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism: The Comité Mondial Des Femmes Contre la Guerre et Le Fascisme, 1934-1941" (Routledge, 2022) Dec 05, 2022

Show notes

Women played an essential role in the international struggle against fascism during the interwar period, though their work has been neglected in broader historiography. In Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism (Routledge, 2022), Jasmine Calver provides a comprehensive history of the Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (the International Committee of Women Against War and Fascism, or CMF), an international women's organization concerned with confronting the impact of fascism on women and children across the globe. Examining the CMF's key figures and campaigns during its short 1934-41 tenure, Calver reveals its place at the forefront of global debates about the threat posed by fascism and imperialism. This book explores how the professional women activists and the working-class women who populated the organization developed a committee which advocated for women on a global scale. CMF campaigns around the Spanish Civil War, rising Nazism in Germany, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia show its international ambitions. Using newly-available sources to assess CMF congresses, correspondence, travels, and publications, Calver uncovers the complexities of its links to the Communist International, and its status as an early Popular Front organization. The book comes at an important time to reevaluate the successes and failures of historical efforts to combat rising fascist movements.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

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