New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Alison Donnell, "Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2021) Mar 30, 2022

Show notes

By showing how a wide, and surprising, range of Caribbean writers have contributed to the crafting of a supple and inclusive erotic repertoire across the second half of the twentieth century, the readings in Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2021) aim to demonstrate that a recognition of creolized and pluralized sexualities already exists within the literary imagination. Professor Alison Donnell and I talk about her writing process and inspiration, the importance of place, and the ways this book might help us rethink the queer Caribbean.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec, "Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900: A Sourcebook" (Northern Illinois UP, 2020) Mar 29, 2022

Show notes

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2020) weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.

Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.

Valerie A. Kivelson teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History. Christine D. Worobec is professor emerita at Northern Illinois University.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Kathleen Courtenay Stone, "They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men" (Cynren Press, 2022) Mar 28, 2022

Show notes

In mid-twentieth-century America, women faced a paradox. Thanks to their efforts, World War II production had been robust, and in the peace that followed, more women worked outside the home than ever before, even dominating some professions. Yet the culture, from politicians to corporations to television shows, portrayed the ideal woman as a housewife. Many women happily assumed that role, but a small segment bucked the tide-women who wanted to use their talents differently, in jobs that had always been reserved for men.

In They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men(Cynren Press, 2022), author Kathleen Stone meets seven of these unconventional women. In insightful, personalized portraits that span a half-century, Kathleen weaves stories of female ambition, uncovering the families, teachers, mentors, and historical events that led to unexpected paths. What inspired these women, and what can they teach women and girls today?

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Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas, "Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America" (Duke UP, 2020) Mar 28, 2022

Show notes

In Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America(Duke University Press, 2020), Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as “parenting empires,” she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.

Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is Professor of American Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He can be found on Twitter @arman_c.

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Lucy Cooke, "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" (Basic Books, 2022) Mar 28, 2022

Show notes

Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) is a fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom. Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.

Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.

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Hil Malatino, "Trans Care" (U of Minnesota Press, 2020) Mar 25, 2022

Show notes

What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion?

Trans Care(University of Minnesota Press, 2020) is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates. Trans Care is the recipient of the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature.

Hil Malatino is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. Dr. Malatino was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University and Assistant Director and Lecturer in Women’s Studies at East Tennessee State University. His first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) examines the relationship between intersex embodiment, biomedical technologies, and the forms of subjectivity both enabled and constrained by the medicalization of gender non-conformance. His articles can be found in TSQ, Rhizomes, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Angelaki, as well as in multiple edited volumes.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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K. S. Batmanghelichi, "Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran" (Bloomsbury, 2020) Mar 25, 2022

Show notes

Gender and sexuality in modern Iran are frequently examined through the prisms of nationalist symbols and religious discourse. In Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran (Bloomsbury, 2020), Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway, takes a different approach, by interrogating how normative ideas of women's bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed as immodest and taboo. Through a diverse blend of sources, including a popular women's journal, a red-light district, cases studies of temporary marriages, iconic public statues, and an HIV-AIDS advocacy organization in Tehran, Batmanghelichi argues that conceptions of gender and sexuality have been mediated in public discourse and experienced and modified by women themselves over the past thirty years of the Islamic Republic. In our conversation we discuss the regulation of gender & sexuality through bodily technologies, tensions between state notions of modernization and Islamization, how Iranian women were visualized in the pages of magazines, a micro-history of the Red-light district in Tehran, organizing sex work within Islamic frameworks through temporary marriages, reinforcing “Islamic” public morality through the regulation of public space, the disfiguring of female mannequins, the challenges of ethnographic research and learning to ask new questions, and notions of gendered work in contemporary Iran.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Heather R. Hlavka and Sameena Mulla, "Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication" (NYU Press, 2021) Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

Scholars Heather Hlavka (Marquette University) and Sameena Mulla (Emory University) have written a new book that examines and interrogates the place and space of the courtroom, the use of expertise, especially scientific expertise, in the adjudicative process, and how this all intersects with race and gender in cases of sexual assault. Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication(NYU Press, 2021) is the result of a long-term ethnographic study of sexual assault cases in the city of Milwaukee, and how those cases, as they come through the legal system, re-animate cultural narratives and re-inscribe the authority associated with law courts and the legal system itself. A key focus of the research was in examining the ways in which medicolegal and forensic evidence was used in the trial process, and how the reliance on these scientific resources and those who narrate and explain these dimensions of evidence and information are often set in contrast with the experiences of the victim-witnesses in sexual assault cases.

Hlavka and Mulla, and their team of students and research assistants, spent more than five years in the Milwaukee County Courthouse, sitting in at all aspects of the trial process, from jury selection to the trial itself, and more. During this time, all of the researchers observed the dynamics around how victims and victim-witnesses were assessed based on their class, race, virtue, gender, and how their very bodies were re-visited during the course of the evidence presentment. This analysis was seen in contrast to the approach to “expert” testimony in the form of medical professionals, forensic professionals, police, and legal professionals. Key points that come through the research, and thus through the book, note how the racialize and gendered narratives are clear within the interactions in the courtroom, but these dynamics do not generally come through in trial transcripts, opinions, or the judicial record of a case. Thus, the deeply lopsided racial dynamics of the courtroom are not clear in the written record but are starkly clear within the walls of the courtroom.

Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication is a multi-layered, multi-method examination of how the judicial system, in context of sexual assault adjudication, does not, in fact, achieve what might be a just outcome in many situations. The adversarial legal system in the United States does not generally assist the communities that are often broken by this very process. Hlavka and Mulla also suggest that the investment in and use of forensic and scientific evidence has not, in fact, shifted the outcomes in these kinds of cases. Bodies in Evidence will be of interest to a great many readers, from a host of different perspectives and disciplines.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Serena Owusua Dankwa, "Knowing Women: Same-sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

Knowing Women: Same-sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity. Paying close attention to the women's practices of self-reference, Dankwa refers to them as 'knowing women' in a way that both distinguishes them from, and relates them to categories such as lesbian or supi, a Ghanaian term for female friend. In doing so, this study is not only a significant contribution to the field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been underrepresented, but a starting point to further theorize the relation between gender, kinship, and sexuality that is key to queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Serena O. Dankwa is an Associate Researcher in the Institute of Social Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies at the University of Bern and is affiliated with Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. She previously held the Sarah Pettit Fellowship at Yale University and worked as a music journalist with Swiss Radio and Television.

Today, she advocates for the rights and dignity of migrant sex workers and women of color in Switzerland. She is a co-founder of the Black women’s network Bla*Sh and a co-editor of the book Racial Profiling: Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand (2019).

Thomas Zuber is a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University.

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Elisabeth Ceppi, "Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England" (Dartmouth College Press, 2018) Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

Early American literature scholar Elisabeth Ceppi’s thought-provoking new book, Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England(Dartmouth College Press, 2018), rewrites the familiar narrative of the relation between Puritan religious culture and New England’s economic culture as a history of the primary discourse that connected them: service. The understanding early Puritans had of themselves as God’s servants and earthly masters was shaped by their immersion in an Atlantic culture of service and the worldly pressures and opportunities generated by New England’s particular place in it. Concepts of spiritual service and mastery determined Puritan views of the men, women, and children who were servants and slaves in that world. So, too, did these concepts shape the experience of family, labor, law, and economy for those men, women, and children—the very bedrock of their lives. This strikingly original look at Puritan culture will appeal to a wide range of Americanists and historians.

Elisabeth Ceppi is a Professor of English at Portland State University. Professor Ceppi’s research focuses on early American representations of unfreedom and what they reveal about how concepts of liberty, authority, and obedience entwine with hierarchies of gender, race, and class.

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.

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