New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Naleli Morojele, "Women Political Leaders in Rwanda and South Africa: Narratives of Triumph and Loss" (Barbara Budrich 2016) Oct 23, 2019

Show notes

Rwanda and South Africa have some of the highest rates of women’s political representation in the world, with significant growth particularly in the last 20 years. Through interviews with eleven women who have held formal political leadership since 1994 in Rwanda and South Africa, Women Political Leaders in Rwanda and South Africa: Narratives of Triumph and Loss (Barbara Budrich, 2016) explores the ways in which life experiences, education, activism, and social and cultural identities have shaped the individual journeys and contributions of women in politics in the two countries and investigates role of women’s political representation in achieving social and economic progress in the aftermath of conflict. Author Naleli Morojele, Human Rights Officer at the South African Human Rights Commission and PhD candidate at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, presents an in-depth look at the challenges that women encounter as they navigate patriarchal power structures and gendered expectations in the legislature, the home, and society at large and balance conflicting political identities based on gender, race, and class as they work to effect change.

Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University.

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C. Strachan and L. Poloni-Staudinger, "Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices" (Sage, 2019) Oct 09, 2019

Show notes

Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices (Sage, 2019) is a comprehensive and useful addition to the established literature on women and politics. This book, authored by four political scientists with a diversity of training and expertise, delves into a broad and extensive overview of the issues that have long surrounded women in civic life and in pursuing positions of power and leadership. J. Cherie Strachan and Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger, Shannon L. Jenkins, Candice D. Ortbals start with an anthropological understanding of how and where sex-specific societal roles were established, leading to the establishment of patriarchal structures and societal norms, and how these structures, norms, expectations, and roles have long kept women out of the public sphere. The thrust of Why Don’t Women Rule the World? is to help students and scholars understand women and politics, analyzing the limits that women have faced, and exploring how and where these limits have been dismantled and where they still remain. While the book is generally focused on women and politics in the United States, it is not limited to this perspective, and ably integrates comparative analyses and global examples of women and politics. The book also provides “ambition activities” at the end of each chapter, allowing readers, especially students, to consider their own capacities within the context of the information and knowledge they are learning about throughout the book. This is an excellent textbook for anyone teaching or working within the field of women and politics, but it is also accessible and useful for general readers who want to learn more about women and politics.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

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Ather Zia, "Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism" (U Washington Press, 2019) Oct 08, 2019

Show notes

Ather Zia’s Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism (University of Washington Press, 2019) is a brilliant, bold, and urgent ethnography centered on Kashmiri women of the APDP (Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons). By combining meticulous historical analysis, ethnographic intimacy, and profound attention to the aspirations and tragedies of everyday life, Zia documents the discursive mechanisms and affective registers through which women of the APDP deploy and enact mourning as a politics of resisting the settler colonial regime of India in Indian Occupied Kashmir, especially its ghastly enforced disappearance of over 10,000 Kashmiris. Lyrically written, this book details and navigates the fascinating as well as courageous strategies of resistance mobilized by members of the APDP, while also sketching a vivid and at many times harrowing picture of Indian state brutalities and conditions of colonial rule that Kashmiris, including women of the APDP, must constantly contend and negotiate. The strength of this book lies in the way it moves seamlessly between crafting intimate individual portraits of resistance, and describing the broader terrain of colonial occupation that informs, shapes, and limits the arc and practice of resistance. In our conversation, we touched on a range of themes including “affective law” and its challenge to modern state sovereignty, gendered choreographies of resistance, military humanitarianism and its insidious operations, archive fever and the politics of mourning, and the interaction of poetry and ethnography. This theoretically sophisticated and politically powerful book marks a groundbreaking moment in the anthropological study of Kashmir and South Asia that will also make an excellent text in undergraduate and graduate seminar on various themes and topics.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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A Conversation with Acquisitions Editor Dawn Durante about How Manuscripts Become Books Oct 04, 2019

Show notes

For a book to exist, there must be a lot more than a writer. Of course, the writer is the essential component. But what about all the other hard-working professionals who shepherd the text from manuscript to beautiful finished product? There are a bunch of them, and today we talk to one: Dawn Durante, Senior Acquisitions Editor at the University of Illinois Press for books in African American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Religion, and Anthropology. She tell us how it all works, from soup to nuts. Naturally, we at the New Books Network are very grateful for Dawn's work, and that of all her colleagues at UPs and trade presses, for without their efforts, there would be no New Books Network and you wouldn't get to listen to all these great authors talk about their great books. On with the show...

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick focusing on Black runaway women during the broad eighteenth century.

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Gerry Milligan, "Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature" (U Toronto Press, 2018) Oct 01, 2019

Show notes

Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was and as she was represented across varied types of texts, both literary and historical. What emerges is a discursive construction of the role gender played in the concept of warfare during this time period. How are women depicted in relation to warfare? Are they non-combatant innocents protected by male warriors? If this is not (only) the case, how does the representation of the woman warrior illuminate men and masculinity in the Italian Renaissance? How are gender roles rewritten, challenged, and reaffirmed in the texts under consideration? How do the figures of the virago and the woman warrior resonate with 21st century gender norms? These are some of Milligan’s questions, as well as some of the topics, we consider in this podcast.

Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies.

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Nora Jaffary, "Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905" (UNC Press, 2016) Sep 26, 2019

Show notes

Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press. 2016), tracks how medical ideas, practices, and policies surrounding reproduction changed between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico. Perhaps the most important change analyzed in the book, and discussed extensively in the interview, is the increased interest of the state in controlling childbirth and contraception. Whereas the colonial state was mostly interested in controlling reproduction primarily of Spanish women of the elite, in the republican era—specially in the late nineteenth century—the state expanded its scope in order to reach broader and more popular sectors of women. Abortion and infanticide, treated jointly in the book for people did not draw a distinction between them, came under the purview of communities and the state. We learn that family members, lovers and neighbors started denouncing women more frequently, and that criminal trials rose.

According to Jaffary such change is explained by the emergence of a discourse of sexual honor and virtue that became imperative for a wider sector of women, one that linked reproduction and the creation of a healthy citizenry to the construction of the national state. However, and in spite of the state’s claim in controlling reproduction, this is not a story of an all-powerful state that defined the life and choices of women, nor is this a history of the march of modern medicine (whether that is a good thing or a bad one) in which the state endorsed learned medicine and banished midwives and popular practitioners. As we will learn, this is a much more convoluted story; in spite of the growing interest of the state in reproduction, cases of abortion and infanticide were widely tolerated as were popular healing practitioners, and criminal trials rarely ended in conviction. Judges treated women cautiously and with justice. Moreover, as Jaffary convincingly demonstrates, this unknown history of childbirth and contraception reveals a world of medical pluralism and medical mestizaje—concepts that refer to the somewhat peaceful co-existence, or even collaboration, between a wide range of medical practitioners. In this wonderful book, Jaffary invites us to think about Latin American history in its own terms, to question histories that posit a lineal or teleological progress, and to see that the past, as much as the present, builds its own concepts and ideas that shape how the body is seen, lived, and experienced.

Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s University.

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Benjamin Kahan, "The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Sep 24, 2019

Show notes

In this installment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Benjamin Kahan, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at LSU, about his newest work, The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Despite countless dropped calls, Jana and Benjamin have a delightful conversation about what Eve Sedgwick called “the great paradigm shift,” in which all sexual deviancy fell out of discussion to make way for the homo-hetero binary. The conversation covers major changes in the cultural discourse around sexual identity, but still makes time for conversation about sexual magicians and wanderlust.

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Emily Skidmore, "True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th Century" (NYU Press, 2017) Sep 23, 2019

Show notes

In True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the 20th Century (New York University Press, 2017), Emily Skidmore weaves in a vibrant discussion on how trans men created community and crafted their lives in rural America at the turn of the twentieth century. As Skidmore contends, “True Sex reveals not only did trans men at the turn of the twentieth century often chose to live in small towns and rural outposts, but they also often sought to pass as normative men aligning themselves with the values of their chosen communities rather than seeking consolation in the presence of other queer individuals.” Her work contributes and also challenges conventional understandings of LGBT community formation. By incorporating the stories of Harry Gorman, Jack Garland, Frank Dubois, George Green, Ralph Kerwineo, and many more, Skidmore illustrates that local newspapers and residents understood queer embodiment under heteronormativity, whiteness, and acceptability, but this positionality was not always in accordance with national newspapers. And more specifically, Skidmore finds that U.S. involvement in global affairs also influenced the ways in which Americans understood the lived experiences of trans men at the turn of the century. Skidmore has conducted meticulous research and thereby opens a window for understanding the richness that comes from relying on digital advancements for writing LGBT histories. Turn the volume up and listen in to this episode!

Tiffany Jasmin González is a Ph.D. candidate of History at Texas A&M University. Her research centers on the 20th Century US, Latinx history, American politics, social movements, borderlands, and women & gender. Her dissertation, Representation for a Change: Women in Government and the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement in Texas showcases the labor that Latinas conducted for the realignment of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez

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Zahra Ayubi, "Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society" (Columbia UP, 2019) Sep 20, 2019

Show notes

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpacking these gendered and hierarchical dynamics around ethics and comportment, Aybui masterfully applies feminist and gender analysis to deconstruct ethical texts. In light of her findings, she calls for a “philosophical turn” that must employ critical gender analysis when reading these texts not only in the context of Islamic philosophy, but broadly in the study of Islam. The book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Islamic philosophy and gender and Islamic studies.

M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca.

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Melissa E. Sanchez, "Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition" (NYU Press, 2019) Sep 19, 2019

Show notes

Putting premodern theology and poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics, Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition (NYU Press, 2019) reassess the commonplace view that a modern veneration of sexual monogamy and fidelity finds its roots in Protestant thought. What if this narrative of “history and tradition” suppresses the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith examines key works of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, Melissa E. Sanchez resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the complex historical entanglement of faith, race, and eroticism is urgent to contemporary queer debates about normativity, agency, and relationality.

Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer scholarship. Retracing a history that did not have to be, Sanchez recovers writing that inscribes radical queer insights at the premodern foundations of conservative and heteronormative culture.

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