New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Breanne Fahs, "Burn It Down: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution" (Verso, 2020) Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

Burn It Down: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (Verso, 2020), Breanne Fahs has curated a comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos from the nineteenth century to today. Fahs collected over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, calling on feminists to act, be defiant and show their rage. This thought-provoking and timely collection includes not only popular manifestos often taught in women and gender studies courses, but also introduces readers to works from feminist activists who are often placed on the margins. The eight sections of the book cover manifestos from a wide range of feminist activist spectrums: queer/trans, anticapitalist/anarchist, angry/violent, indigenous/women of color, sex/body, hacker/cyborg, trashy/punk, and witchy/bitchy. Fahs has put together a collection that has something for everyone and that is a must-need on every feminist bookshelf.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Javier Semper Vendrell, "The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic" (U Toronto Press, 2020) Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic(University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Semper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018.

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) Jun 02, 2020

Show notes

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

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Amy Harris, "Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike" (Manchester UP, 2016) Jun 02, 2020

Show notes

Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike(Manchester University Press, 2016), by Amy Harris, examines the impact sisters and brothers had on eighteenth-century English families and society. Using evidence from letters, diaries, probate disputes, court transcripts, prescriptive literature and portraiture, Harris argues that although parents’ wills often recommended their children 'share and share alike', siblings had to constantly negotiate between prescribed equality and practiced inequalities. This is the first monograph-length analysis of early modern siblings in England, and is at the forefront of sibling studies. The book is intended for a broad audience of scholars – particularly those interested in families, women, children and eighteenth-century social and cultural history.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. 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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Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019) Jun 01, 2020

Show notes

Though his advice has saved the lives of millions of people, the name Ignaz Semmelweis is not one commonly known today. In his book Anthony Valerio’s Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor (Zantedeschi Books, 2019). Valerio details the many struggles Semmelweis faced in winning acceptance for his advice on antiseptic procedures. The son of a Buda spice merchant, Semmelweis started his studies in law before a chance attendance at a medical lecture sparked his interest in becoming a doctor. After earning his degree he decided to specialize in obstetrics, a choice that soon brought him to confront the problem of childbed fever. Deducing that exposure to cadavers was a factor, Semmelweis devised a regimen of hand washing that dramatically reduced the morality rate at the maternity clinic where he worked. Though Semmelweis’s treatment was simple, his ideas faced considerable resistance from leading figures in the Western medical community, with the stress from his campaigns to promote his ideas contributing to the institutionalization that led to his death in 1865.

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Mary-Kate Lizotte, "Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences" (Temple UP, 2020) Jun 01, 2020

Show notes

Political Scientist Mary-Kate Lizotte’s new book, Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences (Temple University Press, 2020) helps us to understand the concept of the gender gap in American politics and how this gap looks across a host of different policy areas. Lizotte examines four different policy umbrellas: the use of force, environmental policy, social welfare policy, and policy around issues of equality. Making use of American National Election Studies (ANES) data, the research in Gender Differences in Public Opinion digs into these policy umbrellas to tease out distinctions within these policy areas, examining where the gender gap is broader and where it narrows, both in comparison to other issue areas and in context of the issues themselves. While the gender gap is often discussed during election cycles, particularly around presidential vote preferences and the different choices men and women make, Lizotte’s work is much broader and theoretically encompassing, arguing that there is a values gap between men and women and their thinking about policy, and this is connected, then, to their political choices. There is a need to better and more comprehensively explain the gaps (which do range in size) across policy areas and not analyze each particular distinction independently.

Lizotte posits that “values offer a novel and comprehensive approach to understanding gender differences in policy preferences.” Values, as such, reflect how an individual conceives of the proper role of the government in society. And thinking about different perspectives on values in this context, according to Lizotte’s thesis, helps to explain the gender gap and the way that it traces through different policy areas. Gender Differences in Public Opinion teaches us how men and women approach policy and political decisions from different perspectives and how that surfaces in specific policy choices. Lizotte also explains that these policy choices are important for candidates and parties to consider—since they need to recruit both male and female voters in order to win elections, and they have to understand the basis for choices made by these voters.

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).

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Pamela S. Nadell, "America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today" (Norton, 2019) Jun 01, 2020

Show notes

Ronnie Grinberg speaks with Pamela S. Nadell, the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. Her books include America's Jewish Women, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Prof. Nadell lives in North Bethesda, Maryland.

In America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W. W. Norton, 2019), Pamela Nadell surveys varied experiences of Jewish women who made America their home. In elegant prose, she introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters from the seventeenth century to the present day. This interview provides a brief overview of the book’s arguments and archival research, before turning to important questions of how women’s history, Jewish history and American history can work together. It also calls attention to some distinctive features of Judaism in America, the social roots of Jewish women’s political activism, and a shared passion for mah jong! Please enjoy this conversation between two colleagues with a deep admiration for each other’s work.

Ronnie Grinberg is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing a manuscript on New York Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century to be published with Princeton University Press.

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Björn Krondorfer, "The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men" (SUNY Press, 2020) May 26, 2020

Show notes

In recent decades, scholarship has turned to the role of gender in the Holocaust, but rarely has it critically investigated the experiences of men as gendered beings. Beyond the clear observation that most perpetrators of murder were male, men were also victims, survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries, accomplices, and enablers; they negotiated roles as fathers, spouses, community leaders, prisoners, soldiers, professionals, authority figures, resistors, chroniclers, or ideologues.

The contributors to The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men(SUNY Press, 2020), edited by Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creangă, examine men’s experiences during the Holocaust. Chapters first focus on the years of genocide: Jewish victims of National Socialism, Nazi soldiers, Catholic priests enlisted in the Wehrmacht, Jewish doctors in the ghettos, men from the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and Muselmänner in the camps. The book then moves to the postwar context: German Protestant theologians, Jewish refugees, non-Jewish Austrian men, and Jewish masculinities in the United States. The contributors articulate the male experience in the Holocaust as something obvious (the everywhere of masculinities) and yet invisible (the nowhere of masculinities), lending a new perspective on one of modernity’s most infamous chapters.

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Ashley Mears, "Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit" (Princeton UP, 2020) May 22, 2020

Show notes

Ashley Mears’ new book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit (Princeton University Press, 2020) provides readers with a closer look at the global party circuit. A lifestyle that offers million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today’s New Gilded Age, the world’s moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit—from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez—to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure.

Mears spent eighteen months in this world of “models and bottles” to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These “girls” enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men’s money.

A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.

Ashley Mears, Ph.D. is a Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday life. You can learn more about his research by going to his website, following him on twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Kathleen Gallagher Elkins, "Mary, Mother of Martyrs" (FSR, 2018) May 19, 2020

Show notes

Throughout Christian history, the Virgin Mary has been idealized as a self-sacrificing mother and a model for all Christian women to emulate. However, she is one of many ancient maternal figures whose narratives pivot on violent loss. In her 2018 monograph Mary, Mother of Martyrs: How Motherhood Became Self-Sacrifice in Early Christianity (Feminist Studies in Religion, 2018), Dr. Kathleen Gallagher Elkins (Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI) examines ancient representations of mothers and children in the context of sociopolitical violence. She demonstrates that, as today, early Christian notions of motherhood are contextual and produced for specific political and social reasons. She also interrogates the tendency of both theologians and cultural commentators to read tales of early Christian mothers in an anachronistic manner informed by modern conceptions of the “natural” and “normal” family. Adding contemporary intertexts to the ancient texts at hand, each chapter juxtaposes an ancient maternal figure (including the Mother of Maccabees, Perpetua, and Felicitas in addition to Mary) with examples of contemporary maternal activism, such as Madre and Pussy Riot. Gallagher Elkins thereby shows the strategic, political charged, and rhetorically flexible conceptions of maternal self-sacrifice.

Diana Dukhanova is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI.

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