New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Elizabeth Barnes, “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability” (Oxford UP, 2016) Jan 03, 2017

Show notes

We are all familiar with the idea that some persons are disabled. But what is disability? What makes it such that a condition–physical, cognitive, psychological–is a disability, rather than, say, a disease or illness? Is disability always and intrinsically bad? Are disabilities things to be cured? Might disabilities be merely ways of being different? And what role should the testimony and experiences of disabled persons play in addressing these questions?

In The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2016) Elizabeth Barnes argues that, at least for a range of physical conditions characterized as disabilities, disabilities are merely ways in which bodies can be different, not ways of their being intrinsically badly off. She argues that this view of disability as mere difference has important implications for broader moral and social issues concerning disabled persons; she also argues that her view is better able to respect the experiences and testimony of disabled persons.

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

Jen Manion, “Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Dec 19, 2016

Show notes

Jen Manion is an associate professor of history at Amherst College. Her book Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) offers a detailed examination of how the reform regimen of incarceration developed as the new American nation was experiencing deep social and political transformation. The place of women, African-Americans, immigrants and the poor was recast by new attitudes toward maintaining the social order through the patriarchal family, heterosexual regulation and the property system. Penitentiaries were designed to replace harsh British methods of corporal punishment with republican reform for those accused of property crimes, vagrancy, and public disorder. Reform was imposed through a system of work and submission to disciplinary authority. Within the walls of the prison, women approximated the model of domesticity and submission, while men faced the challenge of demonstrating manly responsibility within a system of denigration. Both men and women charged with crimes resisted the imposition of gender expectations and social hierarchies making their own claims to liberty. Manion not only looks at the gender dynamics but also how race and ethnicity shaped the experience of prisoners as potentially good citizens. By examining the social history of a failed penal system, Liberty’s Prisoners offers a window into the gender and race system of the new republic.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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

Jennifer L. Palmer, “Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Dec 17, 2016

Show notes

Jennifer Palmer’s new book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), uses the stories of two extraordinary families as the point of departure for a study of the ways that household relationships, and the intimacy they entailed, shaped understandings of race, gender and slavery in the 18th century French Atlantic. Palmer analyzes the bonds of friendship, servitude, sex, and godparentage as they related to shifts in legal regimes regulating slavery. Her reliance on sources including correspondence and wills makes for rich storytelling about the complex lives of enslaved people and their owners, as both enabling and undermining of racial and gendered hierarchies.

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

Joe Solmonese, “The Gift of Anger: Use Passion to Build Not Destroy” (Berrett-Koehler, 2016) Dec 10, 2016

Show notes

Anger has acquired a bad reputation in our culture. It is an emotional state that can lead us to say and do things we later regret, particularly when our emotion overrides reason. But anger has the potential for being used productively, as energy for positive change. Such is among the many lessons former Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese learned during his many years fighting for equal rights for LGBTQ people. He shares these lessons, and the personal experiences in which he learned them, in his new book, The Gift of Anger: Use Passion to Build Not Destroy (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2016).

In my interview with Mr. Solmonese, we talk about what inspired him to write a book about such a charged emotion as anger and how he manages to remain focused and goal-oriented in the face of staunch resistance to positive change. The lessons he shares are relevant and useful to anyone pursing an ambitious goal, especially for dealing effectively with challenges along the way. Joe Solmonese is former president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocacy organization, and former CEO for EMILY’s List, one of the nations largest political action committees. He is currently the managing director and founding partner of Gavin/Solmonese, an organizational consulting firm.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He regularly presents and writes about these topics, and you can view his work at www.eugenioduartephd.com and by following him on Twitter.

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

Anthony M. Petro, “After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion” (Oxford UP, 2015) Dec 02, 2016

Show notes

Emerging in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was not just a public health crisis. It was a moral crisis too, argues Anthony M. Petro in his new book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015). Throughout the book, Petro describes the entanglements between the supposedly secular field of public health and the religious spheres of American Christianity during the long 1980s. After the Wrath of God, however, is not merely a book about the religious right or Protestant evangelical responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis. It is a broader exploration of the ways that a set of sexual ethics inspired by Christian doctrine encompassing abstinence and monogamy within heterosexual marriage came to become the national moral prescription against the epidemic as well as the religious and medical leaders who shaped that national sexuality and the AIDS activists who fought against it.

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

Margaret Bashaar “Some Other Stupid Fruit: A Problematic Feminist Narrative” (Agape Editions, 2016) Nov 30, 2016

Show notes

What is the best way to be a feminist? What is the best way to be a poet, a musician, or a painter? As a woman, what is the best way to be a friend to other women?

The very idea that these water marks of success exist, goes against the nature of being biased and beautifully flawed humans who have been formed and informed by our lived experiences. Humans do not fit into neatly framed boxes. We are messy, shape-shifters–we resist social constructs and sometimes we resist our very definitions of ourselves.

Bashaar employs a colloquial cadence to bring the reader into a conversation about defining oneself outside of these relationships/schools of thought and then in terms of them.

This isn’t some sisterhood bullshit, some wannabe

salvation for Eve, some half-assed claim that before

god grew a cock there was no war, because I know

there is violence in all of us–don’t try to tell me

I wouldn’t slice a thing open to watch it die

I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to one of the most noteworthy, non-craft aspects of this book: it has been made available, for free, for anyone to download, print out and keep forever. Bashaar and Agape Editions understand that art is important and granting access to arts is a responsibility that falls, partially, on the artist. Artists can circumvent the broad cuts to funding in public institutions. Publishers can provide access to under-served groups. We all can foster a culture that elevates the arts and humanities to a central space.

We may not know the best way to be a feminist or a poet, but I think we are pretty damn close to finding the best way to be an artist and citizen when we give our labor to feed the culture’s need for connection through art.

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

J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, “Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal” (Cambridge UP, 2016) Nov 07, 2016

Show notes

On the eve of the 2016 election, it is worth reflecting on the history of women’s voting. Up to this weighty task is a new book by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht. They are the authors of Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Corder is professor of political science at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and Wolbrecht is associate professor of political science and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. Textbooks have long given scant details of how the first women voters turned out at the polls. Corder and Wolbrecht compile new data and methods to provide nuance and detail to this issue. What they find is that women’s voting patterns varied greatly by political context. Where women lived, the parties they supported, and the competitiveness of elections related to strongly to turn out. Because context mattered so much, women intensified partisan differences in some parts of the country, while they introduced dramatic new dynamics in others.

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

Sally Engle Merry, “The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) Nov 07, 2016

Show notes

Quantification is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when hearing or reading about the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR). Yet in the 21st century, a wide range of policy and advocacy agendas begin with numbers. Those numbers become indicators, composites, standards, and measurement tools, which then get adopted in advocacy rhetoric or policy practice.

In The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sally Engle Merry combines ethnography, human rights, and science and technology studies to explore how people living in vulnerable situations across the globe are represented by the numbers designed to both name and support them. While numbers do not have agency, and cannot help or hurt on their own, Merry dedicates most of the book to untangling the politics and practice of developing standards and indicators, and interpreting the realities that come with “governance by numbers.” The genealogy of these indicators and standards are given as much space as their application, as Merry describes their highly political origins and a process of their subtle acceptance as normalover time.

With roots in colonial authority and population management, indicators have been developed and used for a range of purposes in governance: to manage people, resources, planning, dissent, and reputations among others. Merry explores indicators and indices from legal, anthropological, historical, and genealogical perspectives, describing a range of unexpected stewards from short-term United Nations consultants to U.S. State Department officials to computer algorithms. While the book focuses on the globalization of definitions, measurements, and management techniques, it simultaneously explores the widely varied phenomena of gender violence, human rights, and human trafficking. On a set of topics that have been broadly fetishized, the overlay of quantified assessments and accompanying responses to them raises many questions about voice, politics, and international policy-making among many other topics.

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

Roy Guzman, “Restored Mural for Orlando/Mural Restaurado Para Orlando” (Queerodactyl Press, 2016) Nov 03, 2016

Show notes

After the enormity of our loss had been calculated, Guzman started writing. Drawn to the page to process his grief and to understand in the best way poets know how, through their art. This chapbook does more than encapsulate the memory of a community, it links that community to a single life and to a larger struggle.

/I am afraid of attending places

that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies

have been cancelled/ when you’re brown and gay you’re always dying

twice/

We are kicking off our chapbook celebration with a call to remembrance to preserve the memory of the 49 people killed and the 53 injured at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL. This is also a call to celebrate art in the face of loss, in spite of loss, and the enduring need of the human spirit to express fear as hope.

If this wasn’t enough of a reason to click on the link and order the collection, 10% of all proceeds will be donated to Pridelines. The rest of the funds will be used in the continued production of the chapbook, including donating copies to places focusing on queer and trans lives as well as overall support of the production of the chapbook.

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

LaShawn Harris, “Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy” (U. of Illinois Press, 2016) Nov 03, 2016

Show notes

LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, (University of Illinois Press, 2016) offers a colorful look at the lives of black urban women who worked and lived in the space between the legitimate and illegal economy. Her subjects are women not previously considered in histories of the working class: mothers, single ladies, churchwomen, hustlers, and partygoers who worked in the underground economy. Motivated by many factors, they sought economic autonomy, to provide for their families, or individual pleasure and fulfillment. The underground economy offered women a break from middle class respectability and opportunities to forge complex identities of self-sufficiency and an escape from the confines of New Negro womanhood. Working outside the wage system in illegal gaming, sex work or as supernatural consultants, they experienced the dangers and thrill of illicit trade, and challenged black progressive crusaders and promoters of racial uplift. As entrepreneurs and cultural produces, they reinforced and reconfigured the race, gender and class hierarchies of black urban life.

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