New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, “The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture” (Routledge, 2016) Mar 27, 2017

Show notes

The wish to transcend one’s mortality, and the anxiety associated with being unable to do so, are universal human experiences. People deal with these in their idiosyncratic ways, often by transgressing rules and boundaries that serve as the parameters of civilized human coexistence. Technological advances expand our capacities for transcending our limitations, especially when they allow us to objectify other humans and humanize our objects. Such forms of perversion are the subject of Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco’s new book, The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2016). In my interview with Knafo, we explore her redefinition of perversion and her view on its current and future manifestations and what it implies for the survival of humanity.

Danielle Knafo is a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University and faculty member and supervisor in New York University’s postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She has lectured internationally and published extensively, including her prior book, Dancing with the Unconscious, published in 2012 also by Routledge.

Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.

Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Michael E. Stewart, “The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas In the Early Byzantine Empire” (Kismet Press, 2016) Mar 22, 2017

Show notes

The prowess of the Roman empire was imbued with courage and militarism. Symbolised by the combative male soldier, Michael Edward Stewart‘s tool of historical enquiry is masculinity. In his book, The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas in the Early Byzantine Empire (Kismet Press, 2016), Stewart explores whether theological constructions of manhood as ascetic and pacifist changed the contours of manly Romanitas. From the martial metaphors of Synesius of Cyrene, to the third gender of Eunuchs, to the paganism of Emperor Julian to the piety of Theodosius I – The Soldier’s Life reminds us that gender has been constructed for centuries. The fluidity of boundaries and power in this ancient construct of masculinity makes a poignant case against restrictive binaries and static hegemony. Published by Kismet press, this book is available online as part of a larger project for making knowledge, history and scholarship accessible.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Kelly Belanger, “Invisible Seasons: Title IX and the Fight for Equity in College Sports” (Syracuse UP, 2016) Mar 20, 2017

Show notes

As I write this, the women’s basketball team for the University of Connecticut is in the midst of a 107 game winning streak. It’s quite reasonable to assert that Geno Auriemma will end his career as the most successful coach in basketball history.

In the excitement of setting so many records, many people don’t remember a world where women’s basketball at the university level was, at best, an afterthought. Kelly Belanger’s new book, Invisible Seasons: Title IX and the Fight for Equity in College Sports (Syracuse University Press, 2016) offers a valuable reminder that what is might not have been. The book examines the efforts by female basketball players at Michigan State University in 1977 to assert their right to an equitable share of university resources and respect. This period was a critical one for the newly passed Title IX, a statue in American law prohibiting educational institutions from discriminating by gender. With the federal government debating how to determine if a school had violated the law, players, coaches and universities tried to figure out how the law applied to them. The result at Michigan State was a protracted struggle by many of the female basketball players to claim their legal rights.

Belanger teaches English and writing at Valparaiso University. She also played basketball at Michigan state in the early 1980s, when the court case that concluded this struggle was still in process. She has an eye for details and nuance and her retelling of the story as history is excellent. But her background in rhetoric allows her to flesh out her historical account with a thoughtful analysis of the rhetorical choices made by each of the ‘sides.’ Anyone interested in Title IX or in women’s sports should add this book to their reading list.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Emily K. Hobson, “Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left” (U. Cal Press, 2016) Mar 16, 2017

Show notes

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives. Instead, Hobson uncovers the gay and lesbian left, whose activists saw sexual liberation as intertwined with challenging racism, militarism, and imperialism. She focuses on the gay and lesbian left in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracing the movement from 1968 through 1991. This community of struggle was separate from both separatist and liberal LGBTQ organizing. It grew out of late-1960s and early-1970s gay liberation, but solidified in the mid to late 1970s, usually seen as a period when gay activism turned to more reformist and single-issue frameworks. Geography, space and place are important to Hobson’s analysis. The Bay Area generated a lesbian and gay left partly because of newly politicized white queers proximity to Black liberationists, women of color feminists, socialist feminists, and Central American anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist refugees. These activists encountered each other in neighborhoods, activist offices, and at marches and rallies, where they learned form and sharpened each others politics as well as changed the trajectory of each others actions. As the New Right gained ascendancy, lesbian and gay activists found common cause with others under attack within and outside the Unites States. Over the decades, gay and lesbian leftists supported the Black Panther Party and political prisoners, challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, built links with lesbian and gay Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and brought their direct action skills to bear on the AIDS epidemic. Their coalitions were not without tensions, particularly ones of race; many gay and lesbian left groups were primarily white, and gay and lesbians of color challenged these gaps to create their own left-leaning formations and solidarities with other oppressed groups.

Hobson analyzes these tensions and recovers varying forms of political critique, strategy, and community. Through drawing on oral histories and archival documents, including striking photographs, flyers, and political artwork, Lavender and Red lifts up a strain of gay and lesbian activism that had been all but lost to memory for most activists and scholars of today.

Emily Hobson serves as Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Race and Identity at University of Nevada, Reno.

Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer justice.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Liz Conor, “Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWA Publishing, 2016) Mar 16, 2017

Show notes

In an activist application of her scholarly discipline, Dr Liz Conor’s Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWA Publishing, 2016) acknowledges its dual potential to disturb and to incite a reckoning – giving life to Audre Lorde’s famous quote that the learning process is something to be incited, like a riot. Using travelogues, cartoon strips, missionary diaries, paintings and lithographs, just to name a few, Dr. Conor’s consultation of a vast colonial archive challenges the amnesia in our national record and, accordingly, the racism and misogyny of our cultural imaginary. Recreating the settler-colonial imaginary and the tropes and stereotypes it projected in the imperial enterprise of knowledge production about Aboriginal women, Skin Deep exposes the interlocking oppressions of gender and race that manifested in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. From the innocent native-belle, to the beaten captive bride, the cannibalistic mother to the bare-footed domestic worker, the sexualised metonym of the virginal land to the unsightly, malevolent matriarch, the Aboriginal women was reduced by the settler to a canvas – recklessly painted with the ideologies, expectations and ambitions of the empire – making the Aboriginal women devastatingly skin-deep.

Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Gregory Mitchell, “Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) Mar 13, 2017

Show notes

Moving through the saunas of Rio de Janeiro, the Amazonian eco-resorts of Manaus, and the Afro-Brazilian heritage of Bahia, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazils Sexual Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores sex as an epistemology – a way of knowing. The ethnographic, theoretical and prosaic prowess of Assistant Professor Gregory Mitchell captures the individual experiences and identities of male sex workers and their transnational clients. Delving into the complex and refractive affective flows that attempt to make desire legible – across culture, race and sexuality – Tourist Attractions proposes that sex work be reframed as a form of performative labor. Exploring how affect and labour shape the performance of masculinity, Mitchell makes a robust contribution to ideas of queer kinship, authenticity and cultural memory. It follows that the conceptual depth of Tourist Attractions is also met by the contextual breadth of its subject matter – from the influence of political economic considerations, to the missionary agenda of gay rights rhetoric, to the metonymic role of the body in heritage tourism and ecotourism. The reader cannot but help become an enthralled audience member to the social choreography that Mitchell observes, navigating the culturally specific affects of individual sexual exchanges and cross-continental tourism.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Ericka Johnson, ed. “Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Feb 24, 2017

Show notes

On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies. From an Alzheimers disease study that relied on the process of sexing flies, to the pharamceuticalized prostate, to the medical experiences of transgender children, Part 1 uses the body as subject to disrupt the binaries of male/female, human/non-human and healthy/unhealthy. In Part 2, titled Creating Subjectivities for Patients in Advertising, the book expands its analysis to the commercial images and discourses used in marketing and prescribing relational subjectivities. Observing the way pharmaceuticals insert themselves into familial and romantic relationships, the HPV vaccine is used as an example of drugs as non-human participants in the parent-child partnership. Through an international lens, Part 3 provides three comparative case studies of the way that knowledge about HPV is produced in Columbia, the U.K. and Austria.

In perhaps the most poignant contribution to feminist research agendas, across disciplines, Johnson concludes our interview by explaining her unique metaphor of refraction. Noting the notorious difficulty of seeing and articulating discursive power structures, Johnson recognises that the ability to articulate what is being said to us or about us, and identifying who is doing that saying, is a cornerstone to feminist scholarship as it allows us to identify against whom can we protest, deny, and challenge. Her metaphor of refraction is thus a way of thinking about material objects, once they have become tropes, such as the HPV vaccine across national contexts, and being able to see it as a prism that refracts the discourses within which it was originally entangled. This image of refraction forces us to think of a material object like the HPV vaccine as creating a spectrum of visible actors, concerns and values. And it is these visible things that help us to articulate discourses – which then allow us to protest and possibly erase their problematic power structures.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Sherilyn Connelly, “Ponyville Confidential: The History and Culture of My Little Pony, 1981-2016” (McFarland, 2017) Feb 23, 2017

Show notes

In Ponyville Confidential: The History and Culture of My Little Pony, 1981-2016 (McFarland, 2017), Sherilyn Connelly examines the long and complex history of Hasbro’s My Little Pony franchise. Since it debuted in the early 1980s, controversy has surrounded My Little Pony. Dismissed as solely toy advertisements and not serious enough, the series has been critiqued since its inception. In her new book, Connelly explores the history of the franchise through four generations of ponies, comparing it to cartoons geared towards boys such as Transformers which, despite their similarity, were largely spared the criticism the ponies generated. The book is a comprehensive examination of the series through Season 5 -Friendship is Magic as well as first three Equestria Girls films. Connelly uses archival research into popular media’s response to the series as well as fan response through listservs, petitions, and fan pages to present a wide-range of information examining the My Little Pony phenomena. In addition to its discussion of My Little Pony, Connelly’s book serves as an examination into how children’s television is mediated, discussed and gendered.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Kathleen Dolan, “When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections” (Oxford UP, 2014) Feb 21, 2017

Show notes

Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen Dolan’s innovative book When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014) is crucial for understanding the gendered dynamics of America’s political climate. As part of the Presidential Gender Watch 2016 Syllabus, Professor Dolan’s two-wave survey methodology delves into the gendered psyche of elections by analysing the public attitudes and voter choice of over 3000 individuals. Finding that gender stereotypes in voter consciousness are present but not determinative, Dolan rewrites the conventional wisdom that stereotyped attitudes are detrimental to a woman’s electability. However, in forcing the reader to acknowledge the nexus between voter and candidate, Dolan’s data analysis extends to campaign strategy.

Based on the 2010 races for Congress and Governor, When Does Gender Matter? builds on the work of other political scientists that have found evidence of candidate emergence being gendered (Lawless and Fox 2010), and analyses every televised campaign ad of the candidates for whom the 3000 survey participants voted. In the gendered terrain between attitude and action, for both voter and candidate, Dolan’s scholarship provides a roadmap for its multi-disciplinary readership into the gendered psyche of American elections.

Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonc’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture.

Find her on twitter @TaylorFoxSmith3.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Stacy Alaimo, “Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) Feb 21, 2017

Show notes

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the theoretical scope of the book, Alaimo analyzes political responses to climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, and plastic pollution, as well as the epistemologies that have shaped our understanding of these crises. Simultaneously, this series of essays also explores the intimacies and entanglements of human and non-human subjectivities in the Anthropocene, arguing for a new materialist engagement with the world. Despite the gravity of her subject matter, Alaimo’s examples and writing are often playful. This not only echoes the complexity and occasional contradictions of environmental politics but also makes Exposed a very enjoyable read.

Drawing on examples from film, fiction, poetry, scientific writing, art, and activism, Alaimo considers the role pleasure has played and could play in various environmentalisms and environmental engagements. Though it bridges and contributes to scholarly work in the fields of environmental studies, feminism, materialism, and posthumanism, this book is much more than a theoretical exploration; it calls on us to rethink what it means to be human and act accordingly. Alaimo demonstrates interconnections between queer animals, naked protesters, melting glaciers, and interested scholars while providing thoughtful guidance on how to understand and respond to the environmental predicaments to which we are all, to varying degrees, exposed.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected