New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Anthony Nownes, "Organizing for Transgender Rights: Collective Action, Group Development, and the Rise of a New Social Movement" (SUNY Press, 2019) Apr 09, 2019

Show notes

Hard won transgender rights have been under attack by the Trump administration. Officials across government have sought to overturn decisions made by the Obama administration to expand rights to transgender people. Who fought those battles and continues to lobby to defend the transgender community is the topic of Anthony Nownes' new book Organizing for Transgender Rights: Collective Action, Group Development, and the Rise of a New Social Movement (SUNY Press, 2019). Nownes is professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In the book, Nownes uncovers the rise of transgender rights interest groups in the United States. Based on extensive interviews with the founders and leaders of many of these groups. Organizing for Transgender Rights not only shows how these groups formed but also how they mobilized and survived. The book contributes to better understanding this social movement and also the ways that interest groups develop.

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Christopher Herbert, "Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope" (U Washington Press, 2018) Apr 04, 2019

Show notes

Not all gold rushes are created equal, argues Christopher Herbert, Associate Professor of History at Columbia Basin College. Dr. Herbert’s new book, Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope (University of Washington Press, 2018) is a comparative study of Western gold rushes in British Columbia and California. Herbert argues that conceptions of what it meant to be white, what it meant to present as male, and what it meant to specifically be a white man taking part in a gold rush differed depending on when and where an individual stood. Clothing, cleanliness, routes of travel, and extracurricular activities like gambling all mattered quite a bit in identifying as part of a racial or gender group in the chaotic Gold Rush West. Herbert offers a new take on an old subject and demonstrates the power of comparative history to find new perspectives on well-worn stories.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Ward Keeler, "The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma" (U Hawaii Press, 2017) Apr 01, 2019

Show notes

Michael Walzer once began a book with the advice of a former teacher to “always begin negatively”. Tell your readers what you are not going to do and it will relieve their minds, he says. Then they will be more inclined to accept what seems a modest project. Whether or not Ward Keeler had this writing strategy firmly in mind when he wrote the preface to The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), it’s the one he adopts, and with the recommended effect. Anticipating that the reader picking up a book on Burma with both “hierarchy” and “masculinity” in its title might be looking for answers to the question of how and why military men dominated the country for so long, and how and why everyone else tolerated them for as long as they did, he tells the reader that he leaves it to them “to speculate as to how such notions as the workings of hierarchy or the location of power ‘above one’s head’ encouraged… members of the former regime to impose control over the nation’s populace with such ferocious complacency”. His own concerns are more immediate and pedestrian, he says. Except, of course, they are much more than that. For as the reader turns the pages they are led through deceptively straightforward descriptions of both street and monastic life, into a theory of hierarchy and a study of masculinity that is at once in conversation with Keeler’s many interlocutors in Burma, and with classics in anthropological inquiry.

Ward Keeler joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss egalitarianism and autonomy, anthropology and audience, clientelism and communism, and how the study of Java and Bali informed his thinking about Burma.

Enjoyed this episode? Then you may also like listening to Ward Keeler discuss Guillaume Rozenberg’s The Immortals: Faces of the Incredible in Buddhist Burma, which he translated.

Are area studies your thing? Then why not also check out the New Books in Eastern European Studies channel. They’re featuring a lot of great books on topics relevant to Southeast Asian studies.

Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au

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Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, "They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South" (Yale UP, 2019) Mar 29, 2019

Show notes

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. In her new book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019) historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding.

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A. Curtin and M. Skinta, "Mindfulness and Acceptance for Gender and Sexual Minorities: A Clinician's Guide" (Context Press, 2016) Mar 29, 2019

Show notes

Gender and sexual minorities face unique concerns and, according to research, are actually more likely to want and seek therapeutic help due to greater levels of psychological distress. But research also shows that many psychologists and therapists do not feel adequately educated or efficacious discussing topics related to sexuality and gender in clinical practice. This interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Aisling Curtin and Dr. Matthew Skinta discuss their new book Mindfulness and Acceptance for Gender and Sexual Minorities: A Clinician's Guide (Context Press, 2016), which offers a number of practical strategies within a contextual behavioral science framework, including mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions, compassion-focused therapy (CFT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), relational frame theory (RFT), and more. With chapters on stigma, shame, relationships, and parenting, this book will be a valuable resource for all therapists. If you’re a clinician, you understand the ongoing need for cutting-edge, effective approaches for treating a variety of clients. With this guide, you’ll learn about the unique application of contextual behavioral approaches as they relate specifically to the experiences of gender and sexual minorities, and feel better equipped to help all of your clients work toward happiness and health.

Debbie Sorensen, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist practicing in Denver, Colorado and a co-host of the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock.

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Brooke Newman, "A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica" (Yale UP, 2018) Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

In an empire built on racial slavery, what roles do blood purity and citizenship play in the creation of subject citizens? This is one of the many questions broached by Dr. Brooke Newman in her new book A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press, 2018), Newman tells the story of how racial mixing affected the status of many different groups of people in colonial Jamaica. In doing so, Newman interrogates how notions of race were largely dependent on government’s role in shaping the meaning(s) of it. Largely, such discussions were based on the sexual violation and rape of enslaved women. Such violations were exacerbated by British print culture’s dissemination of what could only be termed a sort of modern-day rape tourism. A Dark Inheritance ultimately shifts our understandings of British notions of race, sex, and national belonging.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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Michael Mario Albrecht, "Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television" (Routledge, 2015) Mar 26, 2019

Show notes

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Michael Mario Albrecht (he/his)--to discuss a sweeping exploration of masculinity, economic crisis, and some of the great television shows of the last decade: Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television from Routledge Press in 2015. Drawing upon studies of contemporary television programs, including popular series viewed internationally such as Mad Men, The League, Hung, Breaking Bad, Louie, and Girls, this book explores the ways in which popular cultural texts address widely circulating discourses of the ostensible ’crisis of masculinity’ in contemporary culture. A rich study of masculinity and its representation in contemporary television, the book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, popular culture, television studies and cultural sociology with interests in gender, masculinities, and sexuality.

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Serene J. Khader, "Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic" (Oxford UP, 2018) Mar 25, 2019

Show notes

Transnational feminist theory and practice is faced with a dilemma: how should we contest and resist gender-based oppression, while at the same time respecting cultural difference? In her book, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic(Oxford University Press, 2018), Serene J. Khader argues for a way out of this universalism/relativist impasse. She proposes a “nonideal universalism,” arguing that while feminism requires a universalist opposition to sexist oppression, it need not require universal adoption of Western values and strategies. Nonideal universalism answers the dilemma by rejecting the view that there is a single cultural form compatible with feminism, and by focusing on justice enhancement rather than justice achievement. Ultimately, Khader argues that transnational feminist solidarity requires empirical, contextual consideration of the harms of sexist oppression against the harms of imperialist intervention.

Emily K. Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

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Anne Cheng, "Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface" (Oxford UP, 2017) Mar 25, 2019

Show notes

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics of Cole Porter--to name a few--Cheng draws on the oft-studied but little considered Josephine Baker as a figure of articulation for the nuanced contradictions of primitivism, modernism, and theory. Through Baker, Cheng invites us to reconsider the mutual imbrication of object/subject, surface/depth, and exploitation/fascination. Cheng’s careful eye and beautiful command of texture illustrates that dissolving Baker into pure particularity--into pure surface--is the best way to capture her unique agency.

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Tina Sikka, "Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable" (Springer, 2019) Mar 21, 2019

Show notes

How can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle, considers the limitations of our current approach to climate change, and the means through which we can respond in more open, and thus more effective, ways. The book uses the example of geoengineering as a case study in responses to climate change, highlighting the closed nature of the discussions and decision making processes associated with the methods, modelling, and policy for this approach. Drawing on Longino’s Feminist Contextual Empiricist theory, the book offers both a critique of current practice and points to ways in which this could be reorientated towards a wider and more inclusive range of human needs and capabilities. Given the nature of the climate crisis the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the species survives.

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