New Books in Gender

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Carol A. Lipscomb, "The Lady Makes Boots: Enid Justin & the Nocona Boot Company" (Texas Tech UP, 2021) Jun 21, 2022

Show notes

In the summer of 1925, Enid Justin--daughter of H. J. Justin, founder of legendary Justin Boots--announced to her family that she was going to start her own boot company in her hometown of Nocona, Texas. The announcement shocked her family, who prophesied failure and begged her to reconsider, but thirty-one-year-old Enid’s mind was made up. What followed would be a multi-decade saga of tenacity, endurance, dedication, and entrepreneurial success.

The Lady Makes Boots: Enid Justin & the Nocona Boot Company (Texas Tech UP, 2021) is the first biography of Enid Justin, lady bootmaker and the visionary who founded the Nocona Boot Company. Utilizing archival material, hundreds of newspaper articles from across the U. S. and beyond, and many personal interviews with Justin family members and boot company employees, The Lady Makes Boots tells the complete story of this multi-faceted woman and the growth of her small-town business to a multi-million-dollar corporation. Remembered fondly as the hard-working “Miss Enid”, Justin led the Nocona Boot Company through a seventy-four year history that included the Great Depression, World War II, and countless other challenges. Enid Justin was a true Texas pioneer: this is her story, stitched and bound.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College

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Joshua Prager, "The Family Roe: An American Story" (W. W. Norton, 2021) Jun 20, 2022

Show notes

Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947-2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers--a previously unseen trove--and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe: An American Story (W. W. Norton, 2021) presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America.

Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana's Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma's life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe.

Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption.

Prager found those women, including the youngest--Baby Roe--now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception.

The Family Roe abounds in such revelations--not only about Norma and her children but about the broader "family" connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets.

An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Matthew T. Huber, "Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet" (Verso, 2022) Jun 17, 2022

Show notes

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022), Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.

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Simidele Dosekun, "Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2020) Jun 17, 2022

Show notes

Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world. Simidele Dosekun's detailed interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these elite women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist idea that their unapologetically immaculate beauty signals - but also constitutes - feminine power. As wealthy, empowered global consumers and media citizens, the women deny any need to critique their culture or to take part in feminism's collective political struggle. Throughout, Dosekun unearths evocative details around the practical challenges to attaining their style, examines the gap between how others view these women and how they view themselves, and engages with ideas about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity across cultures and class. Intellectually provocative and rich with theory, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture(U Illinois Press, 2020) reveals why women choose to live, embody, and even suffer for a fascinating performative culture.

Dr Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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Dorina Pojani, "Trophy Cities: A Feminist Perspective on New Capitals" (Edward Elgar, 2021) Jun 16, 2022

Show notes

Offering a fresh perspective, this timely book analyzes the socio-cultural and physical production of planned capital cities through the theoretical lens of feminism.

In Trophy Cities: A Feminist Perspective on New Capitals (Edward Elgar, 2021), Dorina Pojani evaluates the historical, spatial and symbolic manifestations of new capital cities, as well as the everyday experiences of those living there, to shed light on planning processes, outcomes and contemporary planning issues. Chapters explore seven geographically, culturally and temporally diverse capital cities across Australia, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Myanmar and South Korea. Pojani argues that new capital cities have embodied patriarchal systems to govern their respective polities which has magnified problems in these cities. The book highlights how in new capitals, notions such as the state, the nation, urbanism, religion, the economy and even nature have been conceived of or treated in patriarchal terms, to the detriment of women and other disadvantaged groups. This book will be an invigorating read for urban studies and planning scholars. The information about the processes of new city formation will also be of great use to urban planner

Access more of Dorina's publications via her researcher profile.

Ingrid Bailey is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Queensland.

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Amy L. Stone, "Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South" (NYU Press, 2022) Jun 15, 2022

Show notes

Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South(NYU Press, 2022) reveals the importance of citywide celebrations like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for LGBTQIA+ communities in the US South. Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile

Amy L. Stone is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. They are the author of several other books, including Gay Rights at the Ballot Box, Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, and Cornyation: San Antonio’s Outrageous Fiesta Tradition.

Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries.

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Lilianne Milgrom, "L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece" (Girl Friday Books, 2021) Jun 15, 2022

Show notes

Today I talked to Lilianne Milgrom about L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece (Girl Friday Books, 2021).

In 1866, maverick French artist Gustave Courbet painted one of the most iconic images in the history of art: a sexually explicit portrait of a woman's exposed genitals. Audaciously titled L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the scandalous painting was kept hidden for a century and a half. Today, it hangs in the world-renowned Orsay Museum in Paris, viewed by millions of visitors a year.

As the first artist authorized by the Orsay Museum to re-create Courbet's The Origin of the World, author Lilianne Milgrom was thrust into the painting's intimate orbit, spending six weeks replicating every fold, crevice, and pubic hair. The experience inspired her to share her story and the painting's riveting clandestine history with readers beyond the confines of the art world.

Pallavi Joshi is a PhD Candidate in French Studies at the University of Warwick.

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Denisa Nesťáková and Katja Grosse-Sommer, "If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust" (Academic Studies Press, 2021) Jun 13, 2022

Show notes

Denisa Nesťáková and Katja Grosse-Sommer edited volumne If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust (Academic Studies Press, 2021) contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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Ziba Mir-Hosseini, "Journeys Toward Gender Equality in Islam" (Oneworld, 2022) Jun 10, 2022

Show notes

In her latest book Journeys Toward Gender Equality in Islam (Oneworld Publications, 2022) Ziba Mir-Hosseini interviews several Muslim scholars of gender in different settings over the course of a decade. These folks are Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, amina wadud, Asma Lamrabet, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Mohsen Kadivar, and Sedigheh Vasmaghi. Mir-Hosseini is a scholar of Islam, a film-maker, an anthropologist, and an activist. She is a founding member of Musawah: Global Movement for Equality in Muslim Family Laws, and the convenor of its knowledge-building initiative to rethink the notion of male authority in Muslim family laws. Currently, Mir-Hosseini is a professorial research associate at the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at SOAS, University of London. Her other books include Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (I. B. Tauris, 1993, 2002) and Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999). She is also co-editor ofMen in Charge?: Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition (Oneworld Academic, 2015), and co-director of two award-winning feature-length documentary films on contemporary issues in Iran, Divorce Iranian Style from 1998 and Runaway from 2001 (2001).

Ziba and the six other scholars she speaks with are contemporary influential scholars of Islam who have been working for decades on gender and social justice issues from an Islamic perspective, using Islamic sources, and in most cases, working with Islamic institutions in Muslim-majority countries. As the tittle of the book suggests, it describes these scholars’ journey toward gender equality. Some of the themes covered in the book are these scholars’ opinion on the role of Muslim institutions in bringing gender justice in Muslim societies, that of the meaning and role of the Qur’an, their approaches to sharia and fiqh, and so on.

In our conversation today, I talk with Ziba about each of the scholars covered in the book, some of the main issues and themes that arise in their journeys toward gender justice in Islam, sharia and fiqh – and in particular about the social construction of sharia – about maintaining hope and faith in working toward gender justice, about experience as a source of theological knowledge, the consequences of these scholars’ work on their lives, the future of Islamic feminism, and the work of Musawah, which is a movement for gender equality in Muslim family laws.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.

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Lin Song, "Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China" (Hong Kong UP, 2021) Jun 10, 2022

Show notes

China has one of the largest queer populations in the world, but what does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of paramount importance? This book analyzes queer cultures in China, offering an alternative to western blueprints of queer individual identity. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, questioning the Eurocentric assumption of the separation of queerness from family ties. Offering five case studies of queer representations, Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong UP, 2021)also challenges the tendency in current scholarship to understand queer cultures as predominantly marginalized. Shedding light on cultural expressions of queerness and kinship, this book highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture.

Dr. Lin Song is a scholar of media and cultural studies, and Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. He holds a PhD in Gender Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is currently working on projects related to Emotional and algorithmic governance in China during the COVID-19 outbreak, and Erotic self-representation and queer cultural production in Chinese DIY pornography.

Cody Skahan (cskahan@ksu.edu) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog at where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on.

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