New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Holly Allen, “Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives” (Cornell UP, 2015) Sep 14, 2016

Show notes

In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the Great Depression and into the war years. By focusing on popular and official narratives, she provides new insights into the questions of masculinity, femininity, gender outsiders, and sexual outcasts, connecting all these categories with federal policies and exploring them in the New Deal context. In this New Books in Gender Study’s podcast we focus exactly on these arguments, discussing further how these analytic categories correlated to each other during the 1930s. Allen argues that cultural representations of gender, sexuality, and race had practical consequences for federal policies, and vice versa. The book is well theoretically informed, based on the variety of sources, but still accessible to read with a lot of examples and compelling stories.

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Ellen Mayock, “Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Sep 13, 2016

Show notes

Recent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experiences of women on college campuses. Female students and faculty members have often felt at odds with their institutions and other members of their workplaces when sexual harassment and assault enter the work environment. What is one to do when experiencing gender-based discrimination in the academic workplace? Ellen Mayock in her recent book Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) seeks to put a name to the phenomenon that many women in academia face as well as provide solutions to institutional failures that allow for these experiences of harassment and assault to occur. Drawing upon feminist theory, linguistics, and the power of personal narratives, Mayock discusses how gender shrapnel occurs in the academic workplace. The later chapters of the book provide very tangible solutions to gender shrapnel that individuals and institutions can embark upon in order to curb the instances of gender shrapnel in academia. Ellen Mayock is currently the Ernest Williams II Professor of Romance Languages within the Department of Romance Languages at Washington and Lee University.

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Diane Ehrensaft, “The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes” (The Experiment, 2016) Sep 07, 2016

Show notes

The gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their true gender identities, whether or not those match what’s on their birth certificates. But the journeys of these gender creative children are often bumpy, as they encounter psychological, physical, and even legal challenges. This all raises important question for these children’s parents, teachers, doctors, and therapists, such as: What are the best ways to support these children’s gender paths? How do we help them face the challenges ahead with courage and authenticity? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we deal with our own fear, ignorance, or resistance to currents of change that we don’t always understand?

Dr. Diane Ehrensaft tackles these issues in her prescient and essential new book, The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes (TheExperiment, 2016). She is a developmental and clinical psychologist with over 30 years of experience working with gender-nonconforming children and their families. She joined me on New Books in Psychology to discuss her book and topics such as the difference between gender-dysphoric “persisters”versus “desisters,” the dangers of making children wait and see before undergoing gender transition, and the cutting-edge gender-affirmative treatment model used by doctors and therapists working with these children.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. 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 working with cultural minorities.

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Matthew Pierce, “Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiism” (Harvard UP, 2016) Sep 07, 2016

Show notes

The story of the martyrdom of Husayn, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is recounted annually around the world. More broadly, the communal retelling of the lives of Shia imams has played an important part in shaping Shia identity and practice. Matthew Pierce, Assistant Professor of Religion at Centre College, examines the early canonization of these life stories in Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiism (Harvard University Press, 2016). Pierce carefully conceptualizes the relationship between history, author, text, and audience through an examination of several collective biographies of the twelve imams from the 10th-12th centuries. From this sub-genre several themes arise in the presentation of the imams, their families, and their actions. Martyrdom is central to the retellings not only of Husayn, but of all the imams. The imams’ death are remembered through images of suffering and mourning but structured in ways that provide solace for the audience. The collective biographies also offer representations of the imams’ bodily performance and communicate idealized forms of masculinity. Accounts of women in the biographies also help in establishing gender norms for the audience. In our conversation we discussed the social role of biography, collective memory, medieval Sunni and Shia identities, gendered bodies, birth narratives, devotional practices, imam Ali’s primordial existence, martyrdom, and the narrative relationships between the imams.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Ellen Fitzpatrick, “The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency” (Harvard UP, 2016) Sep 02, 2016

Show notes

Ellen Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides the story of three women, out of over two hundred women, who pursued the presidency. In the nineteenth century, when women were denied the vote, the self-made Victoria Woodhull, a political and religious outsider, ran on a platform of change and reform. In the 1940s, the pragmatic Republican Margaret Chase Smith entered politics as the result of the “widow’s mandate.” She stayed in Congress for over two decades and ran for president in 1964. The Democrat Shirley Chisholm took on the double jeopardy of running as the first black woman to seek the presidency in 1972. Her grassroots base included black community activists and feminists. All three women faced structural obstacles rather than lack of grit. Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2008 would again challenge the American resistance to breaking the highest glass ceiling and demonstrated how much and how little the prospects for a woman president had changed.

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.

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Charles Strozier, “Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed” (Columbia UP, 2016) Sep 02, 2016

Show notes

When Abraham Lincoln wrote that the better part of one’s life consists of his friendships, it is likely that he had in mind his friendship with Joshua Speed. Starting as roommates in Springfield, the two formed an extraordinarily close attachment, one that provided both men with considerable support at an important point in their respective lives. In his book Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed (Columbia University Press, 2016), historian and psychoanalyst Charles Strozier applies the tools of both of his disciplines to exploring the bond between the two of them. In many ways the two were a study in contrasts, with Speed the more outgoing and polished of the two. Yet the younger Speed idolized the gangling lawyer and politician, and his friendship provided Lincoln with succor through depression and emotional turmoil. It was a favor Lincoln returned as well, and though the two became less close with Speed’s return to Kentucky in 1842, their enduring friendship led Speed to play a key role in Lincoln’s effort to preserve the union during the Civil War.

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Anne Mac Lellan, “Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor” (Irish Academic Press, 2014) Aug 25, 2016

Show notes

Among the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy Stopford Price. In her book Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor (Irish Academic Press, 2014), Anne Mac Lellan provides readers with an account of the life of a pioneering MD and medical researcher. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish family, she trained as a doctor while Ireland participated in a world war and fought for its independence. As a member of Cumann na mBan, she provided medical care for members of the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence against the British. Following the war, she became a pediatrician, in which capacity she developed her interest in the tuberculosis vaccine BCG then being introduced in Europe. As Dr. Mac Lellan demonstrates, Price’s tireless championing of tuberculosis vaccination in the 1930s and 1940s played a key role in winning acceptance for both the vaccine and the nationwide campaign that ended the scourge of the disease in Ireland.

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Michelle Cruz Gonzales, “The Spitboy Rule: Tales of Xicana in a Female Punk Band” (PM Press, 2016) Aug 12, 2016

Show notes

In her new book The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band (PM Press, 2016), Michelle Cruz Gonzales tells her story as a member of a feminist hardcore punk band. The band, Spitboy, emerged in the early 90s in the Bay Areapunk scene. The book provides an insider’s view of the scene, what it was like touring, and how a young Xicana found herself in a genre of music that typically identifies itself as male and white.

Gonzales reflects on the gender and racial politics that shaped punk music and explores her political and racial awakening while performing in the band. She discusses how audiences responded to an all-women band and the roots of Spitboy’s conflict with the riot Grrrl bands. The Spitboy Rule is an unflinchingly honest look at Gonzales’s life in Spitboy and offers tremendous insight into the 90s punk scene. The podcast delves deep into all of these questions and explores Gonzalez’s recent career as a professor and writer.

Michelle Cruz Gonzales writes memoir and fiction and teaches English at Las Positas College. Born in East LA in 1969, MCG grew up in Tuolumne, a tiny California Gold Rush town. She played drums and wrote lyrics for three bands during the 1980s and 1990s: Bitch Fight, Spitboy, and Instant Girl. Gonzales currently lives in Oakland, California with her family. She blogs at https://pretty-bold-mexican-girl.com and some of her solo music can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/michelle-gonzales-52.

Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University, is the host for this podcast.

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Peter Wade, et. al. “Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke UP, 2014) Aug 02, 2016

Show notes

Over the past quarter-century, scientists have been mapping and exploring the human genome to locate the genetic basis of disease and track the histories of populations across time and space. As part of this work, geneticists have formulated markers to calculate percentages of European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry in populations presumed to originate or inhabit particular geographic regions. The work done by geneticists in recent years has been received with a mixture of excitement and concern. Genomics is simultaneously viewed as the key to diagnosing and curing inherited disease, while also posing a threat to individual privacy and raising concerns over the reappearance of racialized thinking in scientific research.

In Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2014), editors Peter Wade, Carlos Lopez Beltran, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos ask how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into the work of genetic scientists? Conducting ethnographic research in genetics laboratories located in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the authors question the perceived divide between the scientific community and society at large in the production of knowledge. This important work illuminates how the concepts of race, nation, and gender are continually reproduced, challenged, and reformulated in both scientific and public discourse.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJs dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965.

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Simon Creak, “Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015) Jul 27, 2016

Show notes

In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal, may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport. Yet from the uplands of mainland Southeast Asia, Creak draws on rarely accessed archival material to tell a fascinating and nuanced story of regional and global interconnectedness through masculinity, national pride and competitiveness. By tracking the idea and practice of physical culture alongside changing conceptions of civility and development Creak shows that there is much more to sport, even in the unlikeliest of places, than meets the eye. Describing it as “one of the most fascinating books I have read in years,” Justin McDaniel writes that Embodied Nation “should become a model for the study of masculinity and sports culture in the [Asian] region and beyond.”

Simon Creak joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss bodily training and aesthetics in the colonies of France, the relationship between physical exercise and militarization, athletic theatrics and state power, socialist spectator sport, and the malleability of what counts as success in competition on the field and off.

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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