New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Climate Change, Oceans and Gender Oct 20, 2021

Show notes

Oceans are inextricably linked to the climate. Today, oceans are warming far more rapidly than they have in the past 65 million years, placing the spotlight on the important nexus between climate change and the ocean.

While there’s no doubt that climate change affects all people across the board, its effect is manifold among socioeconomically vulnerable communities, and among women in particular.

In the third episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Prof. Nilufer Oral, Director of the Center for International Law, National University of Singapore, and member of the United Nations International Law Commission, takes a closer look at the place of gender in relation to climate change and oceans, in the context of her work “Climate Change, Oceans and Gender”, published by Brill.

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Sonja Tiernan, "The History of Marriage Equality in Ireland: A Social Revolution Begins" (Manchester UP, 2020) Oct 19, 2021

Show notes

In 2015, the world witnessed an Irish social revolution. In a historic referendum vote, the Republic of Ireland voted to extend the constitutional right to marriage to same-sex couples. Thirty years before, sex between men was illegal. From the 1970s, LGBT rights activists advocated tirelessly for decriminalization, fair treatment laws, protection from discrimination, and, most recently, marriage equality. In one of the most Catholic countries in the world, it was never easy. In her book The History of Marriage Equality in Ireland: A Social Revolution Begins(Manchester UP, 2020), Sonja Tiernan charts the long road to the 2015 referendum in one of Ireland’s most recent civil rights movements. Join us as we chat about Constitutional Conventions, the power of social media, the so-called “Pantigate,” and that overwhelming moment on May 22, 2015 when the people of Ireland said “Yes” to marriage equality.

Avrill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University.

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Kemi Adeyemi et al., "Queer Nightlife" (U Michigan Press, 2021) Oct 18, 2021

Show notes

The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. Queer Nightlife (U Michigan Press, 2021) joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation. The book focuses on house parties, nightclubs, and bars that offer improvisatory conditions and possibilities for “stranger intimacies,” and that privilege music, dance, and sexual/gender expressions. Queer Nightlife extends the breadth of research on “everynight life” through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists. The book’s four sections move temporally from preparing for the night (how do DJs source their sounds, what does it take to travel there, who promotes nightlife, what do people wear?); to the socialities of nightclubs (how are social dance practices introduced and taught, how is the price for sex negotiated, what styles do people adopt to feel and present as desirable?); to the staging and spectacle of the night (how do drag artists confound and celebrate gender, how are spaces designed to create the sensation of spectacularity, whose bodies become a spectacle already?); and finally, how the night continues beyond the club and after sunrise (what kinds of intimacies and gestures remain, how do we go back to the club after Orlando?).

Dr. Kemi Adeyemi is assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies and director of The Black Embodiments Studio at the University of Washington.

Dr. Kareem Khubchandani is the Mellon Bridge assistant professor in theater, dance, and performance studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Tufts University.

Dr. Ramón Rivera-Servera is Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin.

Isabel Machado is Research Associate with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture hosted by the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at the University of Johannesburg.

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Catherine Knight Steele, "Digital Black Feminism" (NYU Press, 2021) Oct 18, 2021

Show notes

How have Black women lead a digital revolution? In Digital Black Feminism(NYU Press, 2021), Catherine Knight Steele, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Maryland, places digital Black feminism within the longer-term context of Black feminism and Black women’s experiences in America. The book considers examples from the Black feminist blogosphere and offers a comparative analysis of early Black feminist pioneers and key contemporary voices. Posing questions as to the dangers of commodification and the limits of the digital sphere, as well as celebrating Black feminist success, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences and for anyone interested in digital life today.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, "Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia" (Stanford UP, 2018) Oct 15, 2021

Show notes

Muslim South Asia is widely characterized as a culture that idealizes female anonymity: women's bodies are veiled and their voices silenced. Challenging these perceptions, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, University of Sheffield, highlights an elusive strand of autobiographical writing dating back several centuries that offers a new lens through which to study notions of selfhood. In Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2018), she locates the voices of Muslim women who rejected taboos against women speaking out, by telling their life stories in written autobiography.

To chart patterns across time and space, materials dated from the sixteenth century to the present are drawn from across South Asia – including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lambert-Hurley uses many rare autobiographical texts in a wide array of languages to elaborate a theoretical model for gender, autobiography, and the self beyond the usual Euro-American frame. In doing so, she works toward a new, globalized history of the field. Ultimately, Elusive Lives points to the sheer diversity of Muslim women's lives and life stories, offering a unique window into a history of the everyday against a backdrop of imperialism, reformism, nationalism and feminism. In our conversation we discuss autobiographical writing, travelogues, letters, diaries, interviews, low literacy rates, the social and physical geographies of authors, reasons Muslim women narrated their life, the role of editors, translators, on publishers, intended and unintended audiences, the actress Begum Khurshid Mirza, and gender difference across autobiographies.

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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Allyson Day, "The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir, Medicine, and Crip Positionalities" (Ohio State UP, 2021) Oct 15, 2021

Show notes

In The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir, Medicine, and Crip Positionalities(Ohio State UP, 2021), Ally Day offers a compelling critique of neoliberal medical practices in the US by coupling an analysis of HIV memoir with a critical examination of narrative medicine practice. Using insights from feminist disability studies and crip theory, Day argues that stories of illness and disability—such as HIV memoirs—operate within a political economy of stigma, which she defines as the formal and informal circulation of personal illness and disability narratives that benefits some while hindering others. On the one hand, this system decreases access to appropriate medical care for those with chronic conditions by producing narratives of personal illness that frame one’s relationship to structural inequality as a result of personal failure. On the other hand, the political economy of stigma rewards those who procure such narratives and circulate them for public consumption.

The political economy of stigma is theorized from three primary research sites: a reading group with women living with HIV, a reading group with AIDS service workers, and participant observation research and critical close reading of practices in narrative medicine. Ultimately, it is the women living with HIV who provide an alternative way to understand disability and illness narratives, a practice of differential reading that can challenge stigmatizing tropes and reconceptualize the creation, reception, and circulation of patient memoir.

Dr. Ally Day is Associate Professor in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo.

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

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Claudia Goldin, "Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity" (Princeton UP, 2021) Oct 15, 2021

Show notes

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining.

Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity(Princeton UP, 2021) explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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A Conversation About Reproductive Health and Abortion Studies Oct 14, 2021

Show notes

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

The field of reproductive health studies
The data on contraceptive access and effectiveness [even when used correctly]
Why we need to trust women
What happens when a pregnant person seeking an abortion is turned away
The long-term outcomes for people who have had abortions
The consequences for people denied abortions
A discussion of the book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion

Today’s book is: The Turnaway Study, which asks what happens when a person seeking an abortion is turned away. Dr. Diane Greene Foster and a team of scientists, psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nurses, physicians, economists, sociologists, and public health researchers conducted a ten-year study on the outcomes of a thousand pregnant people across America, studying both those who received abortions, and those who were turned away. Dr. Foster analyzes impacts on mental and physical health, careers, and romantic relationships, offering the first data-driven examination of the negative consequences for pregnant people who are denied abortions.

Our guest is: Dr. Diana Greene Foster, a professor and demographer who uses quantitative models and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of family planning policies and the effect of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. She led the Turnaway Study in the US, and is collaborating with scientists on a Nepal Turnaway Study. Dr. Foster also worked on the evaluation of the California State family planning program, Family PACT, demonstrating the effectiveness of the program in reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancy and the effect of dispensing a one-year supply of contraception. Dr. Foster created a new methodology for estimating pregnancies averted based on a Markov model and a microsimulation to identify the cost-effectiveness of advance provision of emergency contraception.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode might be interested in:

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advocacy webpage
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion, by Diana Greene Foster
Advancing New Studies in Reproductive Health
You’re Doing it Wrong: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise by Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan
A discussion of the book You’re Doing it Wrong,

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Erica R. Edwards, "The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire" (NYU Press, 2021) Oct 14, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Erica R. Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire(New York University, 2021) reveals the troubling intimacy between Black women and the making of US global power.

The year 1968 marked both the height of the worldwide Black liberation struggle and a turning point for the global reach of American power, which was built on the counterinsurgency honed on Black and other oppressed populations at home. The next five decades saw the consolidation of the culture of the American empire through what Erica R. Edwards calls the “imperial grammars of blackness.” This is a story of state power at its most devious and most absurd, and, at the same time, a literary history of Black feminist radicalism at its most trenchant. Edwards reveals how the long war on terror, beginning with the late–Cold War campaign against organizations like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Black Liberation Army, has relied on the labor and the fantasies of Black women to justify the imperial spread of capitalism. Black feminist writers not only understood that this would demand a shift in racial gendered power, but crafted ways of surviving it. The Other Side of Terror offers an interdisciplinary Black feminist analysis of militarism, security, policing, diversity, representation, intersectionality, and resistance, while discussing a wide array of literary and cultural texts, from the unpublished work of Black radical feminist June Jordan to the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice to the television series Scandal. With clear, moving prose, Edwards chronicles Black feminist organizing and writing on “the other side of terror”, which tracked changes in racial power, transformed African American literature and Black studies, and predicted the crises of our current era with unsettling accuracy.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelledmonds.com.

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Michelle Caswell, "Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work" (Routledge, 2021) Oct 13, 2021

Show notes

Today I talked to Michelle Caswell about her new book Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021).

What is the place of archives in our society? In archival studies, an answer to this question often presents an idea of linear, progressive temporality. A common trope goes: We learn history to have a better future. That is why history, and archives as a site of historical evidence, is important. In her thoughtful, groundbreaking work, a feminist archival studies scholar Caswell challenges the white imaginary of linear, progressive time embedded in our conception of archives. Pointing out how community archives from different ethnic communities across the US present cyclical temporalities where oppressions repeat, Caswell emphasizes the importance of activating the archives for their liberatory potential in the present. Over a year has passed since the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the global pandemic that has highlighted not only structural inequality, but also an ongoing material and symbolic annihilation of Black Americans. As Michelle Caswell argues in her book, imagining liberatory memory work is an urgent project that needs to happen in the now.

In the introduction, Caswell begins with the question of the liberatory potential of community archives. Chapter 1 outlines the cyclical conception of time in critique of chronoviolence of white, dominant linear temporality. In chapter 2, Caswell draws from four focus groups to show how different ethnic groups use community archives to address repetitive oppressions by constructing corollary records. Chapter 3 focuses on her work with the South Asian American Digital Archives (SAADA) and the road to discovering the importance of liberatory activation. In Chapter 4, Caswell pushes back against the idea of archivists as passive technicians and repositions them as liberatory memory workers. In the conclusion, Liberation Now! Caswell emphasizes the need to disrupt the dominant narrative on future by embracing the joy of advocacy in the present. Urgent Archives will be an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in critically re-evaluating archives in academia and beyond.

In the interview, Caswell recommends following two readings to the listeners:

SAADA. Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America. Philadelphia: SAADA, 2021.

"The Chronopolitics of Racial Time," Time & Society, Special Issue: The Social Life of Time, 29, no. 2 (May 2020): 297-317.

Michelle Caswell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

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