New Books in Gender

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Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019) Jun 11, 2019

Show notes

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biological fact but as a socially-constructed role that has evolved over time. Historically, given assumed paternal uncertainty, fathers were defined in terms of their behavior (acting like a father) or their relationship to a child’s mother (being married to a woman made a man the father of her offspring). In the twentieth century, paternity testing developed as a way to scientifically determine male progenitors, although these new methods never replaced older ways of reckoning paternity. Milanich describes blood tests and other early techniques proffered by doctors and scrutinized by courts as a way to know the “true” father. Paternity testing, she points out, has been used to different ends in different societies: it could identify an errant progenitor or reveal a mother’s liaison. A certain paternity test result could mean economic security for a child or put a person’s life in jeopardy. Moreover, Milanich reveals the uneven application of paternity testing that has tended to protect the most privileged groups in different societies. Paternity is a transatlantic study that moves from South America to Europe and the United States, and its chapters touch upon the histories of science and medicine, gender and the family, and immigration. The podcast features fascinating case studies set in Brazil and Argentina. This book’s reflections on the making of modern paternity speak to our own time, when, for example, the U.S. government is using DNA testing at the border to separate “real” kin from “fictitious” families, as Milanich explains to podcast listeners. The stakes of knowing the father go far beyond determining biological progenitors, and this book vividly reconstructs the political uses and cultural implications of the paternity test.

Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).

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Megan Bryson, “Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China” (Stanford UP, 2016) Jun 05, 2019

Show notes

Megan Bryson, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, centers gender as an analytical framework in the study of Buddhism. The benefit of this approach is vividly demonstrated in Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016), which uncovers the transformation of the goddess Baijie over several centuries. Bryson’s research explores the various social and historical contexts of the Dali region in Southwest China where the deity was shaped by local expressions of the Buddhist tradition. Baijie was depicted as a Buddhist goddess, the mother of Dali’s founder, a widowed martyr, and a village divinity. Bryson combines the exploration of historical sources and ethnographic encounters with contemporary Baijie worshippers to offer a nuanced and far-reaching portrait of the goddess. In our conversation we discussed Chinese and Indian formulations of Buddhism, the Buddhist history of the Dali region, how local Dali elites narrativized the goddess, stories of dragons, Han migration, the Ming and Qing gendered social norms and expectations, and how notions of “religion” and “ethnicity” shape recent interpretations of Baijie.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). 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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Jeevan Sharma, "Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal" (Temple UP, 2018) Jun 04, 2019

Show notes

People’s decisions to migrate in search of work are often discussed in terms of economic necessity, but these decisions are also shaped by a host of historical and cultural factors. In his new book Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal (Temple University Press, 2018), Dr. Jeevan Sharma sheds light on the migration decisions and experiences of young Nepali men from the western district of Palpa who migrate to India to take up jobs as security guards, domestic workers, or restaurant and hotel workers. These young men are not only seeking gainful employment, but also participating in a gendered rite of passage that allows them to enact culturally specific ideas of masculinity. Despite the fact that the long border between Nepal and India is technically open, Nepali labor migrants encounter various forms of structural violence in their border crossings and in their experiences of living and working in India. This book offers a valuable case study for people who are interested in the intersection of migration, labor, and gender, particularly in the context of South Asia.

Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist who studies citizenship, nationalism, and social media, primarily in Nepal. You can find her work at her website and her random musings on Twitter.

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Jennifer Helgren, "American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War" (Rutgers UP, 2017) Jun 04, 2019

Show notes

In her book, American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Jennifer Helgren traces the creation of a new internationalist girl citizenship in the first two decades following World War II by uncovering the activism of girls organizations including Camp Fire Girls, YWCA Y-Teens, and the Girl Scouts. Helgren shows how anxieties about nuclear warfare led educators, psychologists, and government groups to encourage girls to develop their “natural” skills as nurturers and caretakers and become homemakers to the world. These organizations taught girls to understand their responsibility to their family, nation, and globe as united, and girls between 10 and 17 years old promoted democratic education, global citizenship, and intercultural tolerance. Using girls’ essays in magazines like Seventeen alongside their personal letters, pen pal exchanges, and oral histories, Helgren demonstrates that girls internalized an internationalist ethos that fostered seemingly contradictory ideas--they reinforced traditional gender roles while offering a political model of girlhood and challenged American racism while simultaneously promoting a benign image of America’s new global power. During the Second Red Scare, this internationalist identity came under attack as conservatives claimed that the YWCA and Girl Scouts had been infiltrated by communists, and in response these organizations were forced to limit their defense of multilateral cooperation. By the late 1950s, however, the groups learned how effectively balance their American and international aims by integrating their activism with state-sponsored programs like the People-to-People Program established under President Eisenhower. By analyzing this moment of international experimentation and hope about a new, peaceful world system, Helgren demonstrates the ways that gender and age combined to form a new category of citizenship for America’s girls.

Chelsea Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. Her research explores the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States before 1917.

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Anne Balay, "Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers" (UNC Press, 2018) Jun 03, 2019

Show notes

In this multi-layered ethnography that centers truck drivers, Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) describes both the long-haul trucking industry as well as the significance of truck driving for LGBTQ truck drivers and truck drivers of color. Anne Balay first lays out the industry in arguing the ways that systemically truck drivers both are “overregulated and underpaid” and yet is still able to provide intimate portraits for many of her 66 narrators. Among many topics, Balay details how racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are a part, and not a part, of truck drivers’ interactions with customers, shippers, and receivers, how so many drivers find freedom in trucking, the culture of sex at rest stops, and how contrary to middle-class opinion, working-class environments do hold space for LGBTQ folks and people of color. While recognizing the way that truck driving is both dangerous and hard-work, Balay relays the pride and fulfillment that marginalized truck drivers hold in performing jobs that are vital to so many industries and institutions within the United States.

Adrian King (pronouns: they/them/theirs) is a recently graduate of Brandies University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies MA program and is an incoming graduate student in University of Michigan’s American Culture PhD program.

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Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, "The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church" (Palgrave, 2016) Jun 03, 2019

Show notes

The history of Christianity in China has been dominated by accounts of men and of male institutions. In this important new work, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, who is a professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens up an important new archive in Hong Kong to illuminate the complex and challenging story of the only entirely indigenous congregation of Chinese Catholic sisters. Tracing its subject through the difficult history of early 20th-century China, and taking account of Civil War, invasion, world war, and revolution, The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church (Palgrave, 2016) reveals the ways in which very significant cultural changes in Chinese society were reflected in an indigenous congregation as it gradually discovered its own identity.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Barbara K. Gold, "Perpetua: Athlete of God" (Oxford UP, 2018) May 29, 2019

Show notes

One of the first and most famous of Christian martyrs was Perpetua, who died in Carthage in the early 3rd century CE. Though there is no record of her life beyond the details contained in a single text, in her book Perpetua: Athlete of God(Oxford University Press, 2018), Barbara K. Gold analyzes the account of her sacrifice and draws upon the dual contexts of the Christian and Roman worlds of that time to provide a framework for understanding her. Central to this effort is the "Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis," one of the earliest Christian texts and one which presents an incomplete and often confusing picture of Perpetua as a woman. As Gold explains, the gendering of her depiction reveals much about the complexities of her portrayal in the work, which posed a number of challenges for subsequent generations of male authors and Christian leaders in terms of the example she set with the martyrdom described within it.

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Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr, "The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements" (U Georgia Press, 2017) May 29, 2019

Show notes

For most people, geopolitics is something that happens out there, in boardrooms and on battlefields. But critical geographers, and feminist political geographers in particular, have in recent years shown how the geopolitical is something that comes into being in the intimate and the everyday. Enter Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr's 2017 book, The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements: Intimate Development, Geopolitics, and the Currency of Gender and Grief (University of Georgia Press, 2017). The Carpetbaggers of Kabul takes us on the ground with more than a decade of ethnographic research, and offers a critical perspective that highlights the ways in which post-conflict development works to further American power and not, necessarily, respond to the people it should be accountable to. In documenting the coercive power of white saviors, they show how the discourses of geopolitics have real, material effects for people on the ground. At the same time, they show how development projects initiated and run by communities need not (necessarily) fall into those same neo-colonial logics. In our conversation, we talk about what it’s like to do research in Afghanistan, the way gender and grief become a currency for development organizations, and the ways ordinary people fight back against becoming objectified as poor and in need of help.

Dino Kadich is a graduate student in geography at the University of Cambridge. You can follow him on Twitter @dinokadich

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Linda M. Grasso, "Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and Twentieth-Century Feminism" (U New Mexico Press, 2017) May 27, 2019

Show notes

Linda M. Grasso's Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) provides an in-depth look at O'Keeffe's ambivalent relationship with feminism from her early beginnings as a New Woman of the 1910s, to the support she received from women to become a national icon for feminism. Along the way, she distanced herself in multiple ways from women and feminism seeking to establish herself as an artist rather than as a woman artist with art making serving as a personal form of activism. Her desire to control her career and image motivated her to seek gender-transcendence and embrace personal feminism of individualism, self-expression and professional achievement. O’Keeffe’s success, the modernism of her time, and feminism are deeply linked and demonstrate the complexities for women who excelled in their chosen fields and the enduring conflicts within the movement. How the meaning of feminism changed during the course of O’Keeffe’s lifetime and how she became a feminist icon disconnected from its politics are at the heart of this fascinating study.

Linda M. Grasso is a professor of English at York College, City University of New York.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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Zachary Kramer, "Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2019) May 27, 2019

Show notes

Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights(Oxford University Press, 2019) by Zachary Kramer (Oxford University Press, 2019) sets forth an imaginative critique of the way that civil rights law currently fulfills its mission. Using stories that lucidly illustrate the gap between the aspiration of civil rights law and the lived reality, Professor Kramer proposes a new approach. Drawing on existing protections for disability and for religious practice, Professor Kramer outlines the way that a right to personality, combined with an accommodation-focused inquiry, could update and refresh our approach to civil rights.

Zachary Kramer is Associate Dean of Faculty, Professor of Law, and Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

Künga Tenje is an independent librarian in Virginia.

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