New Books in Gender

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Aidan Smith, “Gender, Heteronormativity, and the American Presidency” (Routledge, 2017) Mar 07, 2018

Show notes

Aidan Smith has written a timely and important analysis of the way that we understand images, masculinity, and femininity, especially through the lens of presidential campaigns and political advertising. Smith’s book, Gender, Heteronormativity, and the American Presidency (Routledge, 2017) explores the idea of heteronormativity within our implicit and explicit conceptions of the American presidency—thus focusing not only on how masculinity is deployed to create particular images of candidates running for office, but also how femininity is used for both first ladies, and for female candidates for the White House who must negotiate an even more complicated set of expectations given our two hundred year history with the occupants of the Oval Office. Smith delves into the complexity of gender performance in presidential politics, and how embedded expectations of patriarchy, fatherhood, manly success, and particular experiences (wartime, boardroom, etc.) all contribute to expectations that are applied to those running for office, especially executive office. This book weaves together analyses and perspectives from a number of fields and disciplines, and thus will be of interest to political scientists who study the presidency and campaigns, as well as political theorists who explore questions of gender performance and sexuality, along with historians and communication experts exploring the integration of televisual images within the American household and the impact of this technological shift. This is a broad study that braids together gender performance expectations, heteronormativity, a nuanced understanding of the presidency, and an analysis of what that position and office often mean to the citizenry.

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Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “Of Beard and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair” (U Chicago Press, 2015) Mar 06, 2018

Show notes

Throughout Western history the clean-shaven face has been the default style. However, the ideal of the cleanly-shaven face has been challenged across time in Western society. Facial hair is a symbol of masculinity and the sculpting of facial hair allows men to negotiate their manliness in public spaces. In Of Beard and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Dr. Christopher Oldstone-Moore discusses Western history of the beard and how beard movements have been developed to challenge the ideals of masculinity presented in wearing facial hair. He traces the history of the beard from Hadrian in the second century to the more recent bristled resurgence of today. Dr. Oldstone-Moore presents the beard as being a symbol of self-reliance and being unconventional, whereas the clean-shaven face presents a virtuous and sociable man.

Christopher R. Oldstone-Moore, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer of History at Wright State University. Dr. Oldstone-Moore’s research focuses on gender and masculinity, and particularly the aspect of the hair and body. He is currently researching the history of adventure.

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. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.”

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Dan Healey, “Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi” (Bloomsbury, 2017) Mar 06, 2018

Show notes

In 2013, when the Russian State Duma passed a law banning the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors, some rushed to boycott Russian vodka. In Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2017), Dan Healey provides historical context for the law and cautions against the easy application of recent changes elsewhere. The Russian embrace of LGBT rights will be the result of cultural evolution from within society and not some off-the-peg downloading of a European formula, Healey writes. Decriminalized after the revolution, sodomy was re-banned under Stalin in 1933-4 and remained illegal until 1993. In a series of case studies, Healey examines same-sex relationships in the gulag, provincial criminal investigations from the 1950s, the diary of popular singer Vadim Kozin (who was sent to Magadan in the 1940s under the anti-sodomy law), gay cruising in Brezhnev-era Moscow, and pornography in the 1990s. What emerges is a complex portrait of gay and lesbian consciousness that belies Putin-era attempts to portray homosexuality as a foreign import. Healey also explores some of the difficulties facing queer history in today’s Russia, including a lack of information about prosecutions under Stalin and reluctance to include sexuality in the biographies of figures such as Kozin. The book concludes by examining current projects to mobilize queer memory, such as the Unstraight Museum in Belarus.

Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture.

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Amy Langenberg, “Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom” (Routledge, 2017) Feb 27, 2018

Show notes

Birth and suffering are deeply linked concepts in Buddhism, and their connection has shaped how the bodies and status of women were understood. Join us for a conversation with Amy Paris Langenberg about her book Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom, published by Routledge in their series Critical Studies in Buddhism. Amy takes as her focus an early first millennium work, the Garbhavakranti-sutra, or Descent of the Embryo Scripture. Using this text as her point of departure, and reading across a wide range of genres, Amy explores birth metaphors, the journey of the fetus, and the concepts of purity, auspiciousness, and disgust, showing how the Buddhist depiction of female bodies operated against a backdrop of earlier South Asian ideas. The Descent of the Embryo Scripture speaks to the human condition, but especially to the status of women, fertility, the female body, and mothers. Amy argues that this Buddhist depiction of women’s bodies as disgusting and impure opened the way for a different kind of femininity for Buddhist nuns.

Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu.

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Jerry Flores, “Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration” (U California Press, 2016) Feb 23, 2018

Show notes

What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration (University of California Press, 2017), Jerry Flores explores these questions and more through ethnographic research along with interviews, focus groups, and collection of secondary data. Flores asks the reader to contemplate the ways in which wraparound services may actually be aiding in wraparound incarceration for these young women. By taking a life course approach, Flores gives a rich understanding of how these young women end up in their current institutions, from early histories of abuse and drug problems, then investigates how their lives change upon incarceration. Often, these young women are constantly monitored and punished, with the alternative day school mirroring incarceration in many ways. Following a rich history of feminist research, Flores considers how the criminal justice system is gendered, why we consider women’s particular activities as deviant, and the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in the everyday lives of these young women. This book gives a clear, deep, and insightful picture of the lived experiences of this often hidden population.

This book would be perfect for any undergraduate Criminology class, as the writing is clear and accessible to a wide audience. The stories of these young women would be compelling in any graduate level Criminology or Social Stratification class. This book is also a must-read for anyone working in either wrap-around services or in the prison system.

Sarah E. Patterson is a Sociology postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

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Daphna Hacker, “Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization” (Cambridge UP, 2017) Feb 23, 2018

Show notes

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before. What effect do these phenomena have on one of the most significant social units: the family? In her new book, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Daphna Hacker argues that the family is entering an important period of transition and instability in our bordered, global society. Families have been a legalized social category, but now competing legal doctrines and interpretations complicate the existence of this social category given the movement of people in a globalized society. How does secular law and family law impact families in multicultural countries with inhabitants from around the globe? Are pre-nups a good idea or a bad one? How does globalization influence reproduction in the family unit? How are current immigration debates intersecting with these changes to the family? Anyone interested in the law, gender, and globalization will find this book a great read.

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D. Harris and P. Guiffre, “Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen” (Rutgers UP, 2015) Feb 22, 2018

Show notes

In Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre trace the historical evolution of the profession, analyze more than two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, and conduct in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs. There are a number of recent books, magazines, and television programs that focused on the world of the professional chef. The media perpetually uses men as icons to market the hot and sexy field of being a chef in the professional kitchen. All the while, the work of women in the kitchen is discounted as a domestic role. This devaluation remains intact because of the exclusion of women in professional kitchens. This helps men maintain the legitimacy of the profession and perpetuates the appearance of home cooking as women’s domestic duty.

Dr. Deborah A. Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teachings on courses in the area of stratification and inequality, qualitative research methods, rural aging, and the sociology of food. Harris’s published research has addressed the impacts of welfare reform on low-income women and their families, as well as how the closing of military facilities affects local communities.

Dr. Patti Giuffre is the Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teaching and research in the area of work and occupation, gender, sexuality, and qualitative methods. She has conducted research on sexual harassment, sexual orientation discrimination, and experiences of LGBT workers in gay-friendly workplaces. She is also an active member of the American Sociological Associations sections on Sex and Gender and Organizations, Occupations, and Work and of the Sociologists for Women in Society.

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.

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Katrina Jagodinsky, “Legal Codes and Talking Trees” (Yale UP, 2016) Feb 21, 2018

Show notes

In Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 (Yale University Press, 2016), Katrina Jagodinsky recovers the stories too often presumed lost in the silences of colonial archives: those of Indigenous women operating within systems of American law. In doing so, she argues that Indigenous women in the American southwest and Pacific northwest used Indigenous epistemologies, legal codes, and community connections, to navigate American settler colonial legal regimes and in some cases emerging victorious. Jagodinsky, an Associate Professor in the history department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, uses unique methodologies combining traditional legal history, poetry, and non-written knowledge networks to recount the histories of six women from the border regions of what is today Arizona/Sonora and Washington/British Columbia. Legal Codes and Talking Trees shows how even under ardently white supremacist power structures and within settler colonial societies designed to dispossess Indigenous communities, people not only straddled racial lines individually, but also made families that run counter to easy narratives. Jagodinsky’s book is a call to arms for historians and archivists not to take their academic privilege for granted, and to use innovative research methods to locate and retell difficult to find stories, even when the archives may seem as incomprehensible as the language of the trees.

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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Marie Griffith, “Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics” (Basic Books, 2017) Feb 20, 2018

Show notes

Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017) offers a portrait of how religious views regarding sexuality became entangled with multiple political debates including those over feminism, gay rights, sex education and in charges of communism and secular humanism. Beginning with the controversies over birth control in the 1920s, she takes us through the twentieth century to the most recent battles over same-sex marriage dividing American Christians both politically and religiously. Moral Combat features pivotal figures including, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, the fundamentalist radio preacher Billy James Hargis and the first gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson. She demonstrates how pro and con positions were not always clearly defined and adherents could change sides in a matter of a decade, finding surprising allies. In the new millennium two distinct religious visions for society and human sexuality had taken root unraveling any hope of consensus.

Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis where she directs the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.

This episode of New Books in Gender Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press.

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Sasha Turner, “Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Feb 16, 2018

Show notes

When British planters, abolitionists and colonial officials confronted the reality of the end of the slave trade, they envisioned reproducing laborers rather than forcibly importing them. Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) book places pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood at the center of its analysis and tells the story of broad transformations in the ways enslaved women experienced slavery and the transition to emancipation in Jamaica and the British Empire.

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