New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

David Hajdu and John Carey, "A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge" (Columbia UP, 2021) Apr 06, 2022

Show notes

Too often, vaudeville is seen from the perspective of its decline: it is the corny, messy art form that predated the book musical, or that gave us Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. Rarely is it seen as the populist avant-garde form it was at its height. David Hajdu and John Carey's graphic history, A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge (Columbia University Press, 2021), corrects this misconception, giving us illustrated biographies of three of the genre's most outré and successful stars. Eva Tanguay challenged contemporary gender roles through her outrageous behavior and sexually suggestive songs. Julian Eltinge also subverted gendered expectations of femininity by performing them to the hilt -- but as a man. And Bert Williams, a black man who performed in black face, tried to use his fame to soften the hard edges of Jim Crow bigotry but eventually became exhausted by the racism he encountered within the entertainment industry. These three performers truly were revolutionary, and their stories should be known to any theatre fan or historian.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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

Hugo Ceron-Anaya, "Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico" (Oxford UP, 2019) Apr 06, 2022

Show notes

Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico(Oxford University Press, 2019) is a book about inequalities, social hierarchies, and privilege in contemporary Mexico. Based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Cerón-Anaya’s book focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege. This study makes use of rich qualitative data to demonstrate how social hierarchies are relations reproduced through a multitude of everyday practices. The vast disparities between club members and workers, for example, are built on traditional class indicators, such as wealth, and on more subtle expressions of class, such as notions of fashion, sense of humour, perceptions about competition, and everyday oral interactions. The book incorporates race and gender perspectives into the study of inequalities, illustrating the multilayer condition of privilege. Although Mexicans commonly attributed racial relations a marginal role in the continuation of inequities, the book explains how affluent individuals frequently express racialized ideas to describe and justify the impoverished condition of workers. In doing so, Privilege at Play demonstrates the necessity of considering the role of racialized dynamics when studying social inequalities in Mexico. An analysis of gender relations shows how men maintain a dominant position over their fellow female golfers despite the similar upper-class origins of both male and female golf club members. This book pays particular attention to the spatial dynamics that reinforce social inequalities, arguing that the apparent triviality of space makes it a highly effective way to mark social inequalities and, hence, emphasise privilege.

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 the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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

Hilda Lloréns, "Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice" (U of Washington Press, 2021) Apr 05, 2022

Show notes

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro-Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities.

Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021) weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an "ethnographer of home" as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable.

Interviewer Byline: Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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

Jenifer L. Barclay, "The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America" (U of Illinois Press, 2021) Apr 05, 2022

Show notes

Time and again, antebellum Americans justified slavery and white supremacy by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. In The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), historian Jenifer L. Barclay examines the ubiquitous narratives that depicted black people with disabilities as pitiable, monstrous, or comical, narratives used not only to defend slavery but argue against it. As she shows, this relationship between ableism and racism impacted racial identities during the antebellum period and played an overlooked role in shaping American history afterward. Barclay also illuminates the everyday lives of the ten percent of enslaved people who lived with disabilities. Devalued by slaveholders as unsound and therefore worthless, these individuals nonetheless carved out an unusual autonomy. Their roles as caregivers, healers, and keepers of memory made them esteemed within their own communities and celebrated figures in song and folklore.

Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.

Jenifer L. Barclay is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Buffalo. Her research places African American history in conversation with the “new” disability history, a field that emphasizes disability as a lived human experience embedded in a set of socially constructed ideas that change over time, across cultures, and in relation to other categories of identity such as race, gender, class and sexuality. She earned her Ph.D. in African American History at Michigan State University.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. A social historian of gender, slavery, and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic World, Jerrad is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Work of Freedom: African American Women and the Ordeal of Emancipation in New England, 1740-1840” which examines the everyday lives, labors, and emancipation experiences of African-descended women in late-colonial and early republic New England. Jerrad is also increasingly interested in the history of slavery and disability in the context of early America; his research examining the lives and physically-disabling nature of enslavement in early New England will be published in two peer-reviewed anthologies - one of which is co-edited by Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt Kennedy - early next year.

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

Chelsea Phillips, "Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800" (U of Delaware Press, 2022) Apr 04, 2022

Show notes

The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800(University of Delaware Press, 2022) uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.

Hannah Smith is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She can be reached at smit9201@umn.edu.

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

Rama Srinivasan, "Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

Inquiries into marital patterns can serve as an effective lens to analyze social structures and material cultures not only on the question of sexuality, but also on the nature of a private citizen’s engagement with state and law. Through ethnographic research in courtrooms, community, and kinship spaces, Rama Srinivasan outlines the transformations in material culture and political economy that have led to renewed negotiations on the institution of marriage in North India, especially in legal spaces. Tracing organically evolving notions of sexual consent and legal subjectivity, Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India (Rutgers UP, 2020) underlines how non-normative decisions regarding marriage become possible in a region otherwise known for high instances of honor killings and rigid kinship structures. Aspirations for consensual relationships have led to a tentative attempt to forge relationships that are non-normative but grudgingly approved after state intervention. The book traces this nascent and under-explored trend in the North Indian landscape.

Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018).

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

Paige Sweet, "The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath" (U California Press, 2021) Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

For women who have experienced domestic violence, proving that you are a “good victim” is no longer enough. Victims must also show that they are recovering, as if domestic violence were a disease: they must transform from “victims” into “survivors.” Women’s access to life-saving resources may even hinge on “good” performances of survivorhood. Through archival and ethnographic research, Paige L. Sweet reveals how trauma discourses and coerced therapy play central roles in women’s lives as they navigate state programs for assistance. Sweet uses an intersectional lens to uncover how “resilience” and “survivorhood” can become coercive and exclusionary forces in women’s lives. With nuance and compassion, The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath (U California Press, 2021) wrestles with questions about the gendered nature of the welfare state, the unintended consequences of feminist mobilizations for anti-violence programs, and the women who are left behind by the limited forms of citizenship we offer them.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com

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

Jessica P. Clark, "The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London" (Bloomsbury, 2020) Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

In The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury, 2020), historian Jessica Clark takes the reader on a tour through the shifting commercial and cultural landscape of London in the second half of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th. The business of beatification––aimed at both men and women, and conducted by both men and women––was influenced by and reflective of shifting attitudes towards women in public spaces, the influx and success of immigrants in the nation’s capital, the development of wholesale production processes and the standardization of commodities, and the cultural competition between European nations that accompanied the growing political and military competition at the fin de siècle, among other things. In other words, Jessica Clark shows us that The Business of Beauty intersects with an amazing array of historical subjects.

Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-host of the Lies Agreed Upon podcast and author of Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2020)

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

Abigail Susik, "Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work" (Manchester UP, 2021) Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description.

For many artists, however, the practice of Surrealist art took on an explicitly political and therefore practical dimensions. In Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work(Manchester UP, 2021), art historian Abigail Susik argues that many Surrealists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work.

Abigail Susik speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Oscar Domínguez. She brings these questions into the present by engaging with the work of the Chicago Surrealists of the 1960s and 70s.

Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and co-editor of Surrealism and film after 1945.

Man Ray, Séance de rêve éveiillé
Oscar Domínguez, Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle
Surrealism Without Borders at Tate Modern
Abigail’s op-eds in the Washington Post and New York Times
Abigail’s forthcoming book Radical Dreams

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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

Rachel E. Gross, "Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage" (W. W. Norton, 2022) Mar 30, 2022

Show notes

A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet.

That is finally changing. Today, a new generation of researchers is turning its gaze to the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making—the uterus, ovaries, and vagina—and illuminating them as part of a dynamic, resilient, and ever-changing whole. Welcome to Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage (W.W. Norton, 2022), an odyssey into a woman’s body from a fresh perspective, ushering in a whole new cast of characters.

In Boston, a pair of biologists are growing artificial ovaries to counter the cascading health effects of menopause. In Melbourne, a urologist remaps the clitoris to fill in crucial gaps in female sexual anatomy. Given unparalleled access to labs and the latest research, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on a scientific journey to the center of a wonderous world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves.

This paradigm shift is made possible by the growing understanding that sex and gender are not binary; we all share the same universal body plan and origin in the womb. That’s why insights into the vaginal microbiome, ovarian stem cells, and the biology of menstruation don’t mean only a better understanding of female bodies, but a better understanding of male, non-binary, transgender, and intersex bodies—in other words, all bodies.

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, and shocking, Vagina Obscura is a powerful testament to how the landscape of human knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.

Sine Yaganoglu: Having trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer, I switched to industry following my PhD at ETH Zurich and have been working in innovation management and diagnostics. Besides reading about science, innovation and entrepreneurship, I have become interested in the scientific and cultural aspects of parenting and motherhood since welcoming my first child.

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