New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Alicia M. Walker, "Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation, Infidelity" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) Sep 03, 2020

Show notes

Alicia M. Walker’s new book Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation, Infidelity (Palgrave MacMillan) provides an insider glimpse of the experiences and perceptions that men have regarding their participation in infidelity. Walker offers a personal view of the inner workings of her participants’ most intimate relationships, as well as the way the men in her study negotiate marriages that fall short of their expectations.

She collected her sample from an online dating service called Ashley Madison and her findings from this study contradicted the normalized gendered social scripts. The motivations for the men in this study to seek outside partnerships were not rooted in the desire for sexual pleasure or variety. Rather, the men in her study described their relationships as an outlet to receive emotional support that they did not receive from their primary partnership.

Their romantic partners provided them with attention and validation that was not provided by their primary partnership. Many of the men shared that their primary partners made them feel emasculated. Their outside partners provided support and praise, and aid in the processing of complex emotions.

This in-depth analysis provides a unique insight into the experiences that men have with sexuality and masculinity, and will interesting to those who seek to understand male infidelity from a sociological perspective that has not been widely explored before. One of the reviewers for this book declared that Dr. Walker has created a new “Sociology of Infidelity”.

Alicia M. Walker, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Missouri State University.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, "The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant", was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Kristin Kobez Du Mez, "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation" (Liveright, 2020) Sep 03, 2020

Show notes

One of the most perplexing elements of Donald Trumps’s 2016 electoral victory was the overwhelming support he received from white Evangelicals, a demographic that has stubbornly clung to him in the face of everything he has done. The fact that a thrice-married reality-TV star has been able to hold onto the ‘moral majority’ through thick and thin the last few years seems to many to be a sort of cultural contradiction.

However, some would argue that the Evangelical support of Trump makes total sense given that, in spite of his supposed moral failings, he was just the sort of man they were looking for.

This is the argument my guest today, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, makes in her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright 2020). The book traces a century of Evangelical ideas around masculinity, gender, family and identity, and how these ideas became intertwined with ideas around nationalism, militarism, foreign policy and race. The result is a book that covers a century of cultural and intellectual development, and gives us a sense of how Trump turned out to be the right man for the job of winning the Evangelical vote.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor in the history department at Calvin University. She is also the author of A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford 2015). Her writing has appeared in a number of outlets including The Washington Post, and she regularly blogs at Patheos’ Anxious Bench.

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Ronak K. Kapadia, "Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War"(Duke UP, 2019) Sep 03, 2020

Show notes

In Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press), Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East.

He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities.

Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural theorist of race, security, and empire in the late 20th and early 21st century United States.

Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia.

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John F. Marszalek III, "Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi" (U Mississippi Press, 2020) Sep 02, 2020

Show notes

In Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (University of Mississippi Press, 2020), John F. Marszalek III shares conversations with same-sex couples living in small-town and rural Mississippi. In the first book of its kind to focus on Mississippi, couples tell their stories of how they met and fell in love, their decisions on whether or not to marry, and their experiences as sexual minorities with their neighbors, families, and churches. Their stories illuminate a complicated relationship between many same-sex couples and their communities, influenced by southern culture, religion, and family norms.

As Marszalek guides readers into the homes of diverse same-sex couples, he weaves in his own story of meeting his husband and living as a married gay man in Mississippi. Both the couples and he explain why they remain in one of the most conservative states in the country rather than moving to a place with a large, vibrant gay community.

In addition to sharing his own experiences, Marszalek reviews the literature on the topic, including writings from southern and rural queer studies, history, sociology, and psychology, to explain how the couples’ relationships and experiences compare to those of same-sex couples in other areas and times. Consequently, Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet is written for both the scholar of southern and queer studies and for anyone interested in learning about the experiences of same-sex couples.

John F. Marszalek III is clinical faculty of the online clinical mental health counseling program at Southern New Hampshire University. He is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi, published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Mississippi with his husband and their two dogs.

Chris Babits is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Utah State University. In addition to teaching, he’s feverishly writing his book, To Cure a Sinful Nation: A History of Conversion Therapy in the United States (University of Chicago Press).

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Marion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018) Sep 02, 2020

Show notes

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earliest and most loyal supporter.

In her new book The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (Routledge, 2018), Marion Bower puts Joan Riviere herself, the woman and the psychoanalyst, in the spotlight. She shows how Riviere made use of the latest psychoanalytic ideas in a highly creative and original way, expressing herself with clarity and emotional depth in seminal works about the inner life of female sexuality and treatment impasses. She was able to draw from a lifetime of challenging and fruitful experiences. After a childhood rife with emotional neglect, she stepped into the rich ferment of the dying Victorian era and came in touch with major progressive forces of the time like the suffragettes and the Society for Psychical Research. As a dressmaker’s apprentice, she was among the first wave of women entering the work force. When the shifting soil of her childhood proved unstable, she entered analysis with Ernest Jones and, after becoming an analyst, with Freud himself. This personal connection proved fortuitous to the newly formed British Psychoanalytic Society, as it provided a solid anchor against the dividing drift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

Bower paints an intimate portrait of a woman with a stern and sometimes vitriolic public persona and a shy and fragile personality that was saved by her involvement in psychoanalysis. In her best moments she was able to bridge that gap in her psychoanalytic writing, revealing herself through her theoretical musings.

Marion Bower has trained as a teacher, social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked for many years in the child mental health services, including the Tavistock Clinic, and has edited and co-edited four books on various applications of psychoanalysis. She is currently co-editing a book on sexual exploitation.

Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de.

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Philip Nash, "Breaking Protocol: America's First Female Ambassadors, 1933-1964" (UP of Kentucky, 2020) Sep 01, 2020

Show notes

"It used to be," soon-to-be secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright said in 1996, "that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap."

This world of US diplomacy excluded women for a variety of misguided reasons: they would let their emotions interfere with the task of diplomacy, they were not up to the deadly risks that could arise overseas, and they would be unable to cultivate the social contacts vital to success in the field. The men of the State Department objected but had to admit women, including the first female ambassadors: Ruth Bryan Owen, Florence "Daisy" Harriman, Perle Mesta, Eugenie Anderson, Clare Boothe Luce, and Frances Willis. These were among the most influential women in US foreign relations in their era.

In Breaking Protocol: America's First Female Ambassadors, 1933-1964 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020), Philip Nash examines the history of the "Big Six" and how they carved out their rightful place in history. After a chapter capturing the male world of American diplomacy in the early twentieth century, the book devotes one chapter to each of the female ambassadors and delves into a number of topics, including their backgrounds and appointments, the issues they faced while on the job, how they were received by host countries, the complications of protocol, and the press coverage they received, which was paradoxically favorable yet deeply sexist. In an epilogue that also provides an overview of the role of women in modern US diplomacy, Nash reveals how these trailblazers helped pave the way for more gender parity in US foreign relations.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Paul Moyer, "Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Cornell UP, 2020) Aug 28, 2020

Show notes

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble.” These famous lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth elicit popular images of sinister witches over their cauldrons, boiling evil potions. Today on New Books in History we’re talking with Paul Moyer, author of Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Cornell University Press), which places New England’s battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective.

In this accessible and comprehensive study of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies, Moyer explores how English colonists understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting.

Paul Moyer received a BA from Bowdoin College in 1992 and earned his PhD in History from the College of William and Mary in 1999. He has taught at the University of Central Arkansas and the College of William and Mary as a Visiting Assistant Professor and is currently a Professor of History at SUNY Brockport. He is the author of several books including Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Frontier (2007) and The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America (2015) both by Cornell University Press.

Dr. Julia Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University.

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S. Grayzel and T. Proctor, "Gender and the Great War" (Oxford UP, 2017) Aug 28, 2020

Show notes

In this week episode of “New Books in History,” we’ll discuss Gender and the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2017) with editors Sue Grayzel and Tammy Proctor, focusing on ideas about how to teach using their edited collection.

The centenary of the First World War from 2014 to 2018 offered an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood.

The negotiation regarding concepts of gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative.

Given the vast literature on the war itself, scholarship on gender provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume.

Susan R. Grayzel is Professor of History at Utah State University, where she researches and teaches the history of modern Europe, gender, and the world wars.

Tammy M. Proctor is Distinguished Professor of History and Department Head at Utah State University.

Julia M. Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University where she teaches early modern and modern European history. Her book, Young Subjects, is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Jessica Marie Johnson, "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) Aug 28, 2020

Show notes

The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world.

Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Lisa Selin Davis, "Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different" (Hachette Go, 2020) Aug 27, 2020

Show notes

We are in the middle of a cultural revolution, where the spectrum of gender and sexual identities is seemingly unlimited. So when author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis's six-year-old daughter first called herself a "tomboy," Davis was hesitant. Her child favored sweatpants and T-shirts over anything pink or princess-themed, just like the sporty, skinned-kneed girls Davis had played with as a kid. But "tomboy" seemed like an outdated word-why use a word with "boy" in it for such girls at all?

So was it outdated? In an era where some are throwing elaborate gender reveal parties and others are embracing they/them pronouns, Davis set out to answer that question, and to find out where tomboys fit into our changing understandings of gender.

In Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different (Hachette Go), Davis explores the evolution of tomboyism from a Victorian ideal to a twenty-first century fashion statement, honoring the girls and women-and those who identify otherwise-who stomp all over archaic gender norms. She highlights the forces that have shifted what we think of as masculine and feminine, delving into everything from clothing to psychology, history to neuroscience, and the connection between tomboyism, gender identity, and sexuality.

Above all else, Davis' comprehensive deep-dive inspires us to better appreciate those who defy traditional gender boundaries, and the incredible people they become.

Whether you're a grown-up tomboy or raising a gender-rebel of your own, Tomboy is the perfect companion for navigating our cultural shift. It is a celebration of both diversity and those who dare to be different, ultimately revealing how gender nonconformity is a gift.

Lisa Selin Davis is an essayist, novelist, and journalist who has written for major publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Time, Yahoo!, and Salon, among many others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and kids.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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