New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Beverly Bossler, ed., “Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters” (U of Washington Press, 2015) Apr 18, 2016

Show notes

Beverly Bossler‘s wonderful new edited volume is a must-read for anyone interested in histories of and with gender in China. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters (University of Washington Press, 2015) collects nine essays that each explore and speak to some aspect of a handful of key questions raised by the volume: What is gender in Chinese history? How has the study of gender changed the way we understand Chinese history? How does the study of gender in China alter our understanding of what gender is? In the course of the podcast, we talked about some of the larger themes that the volume addresses, as well as the specific contributions of some of the essays, many of which either use unconventional sources, or use conventional sources in unconventional ways.

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Susannah Drake, “Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Apr 11, 2016

Show notes

In Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Susannah Drake, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, investigates the representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings. She argues that there was a close connection between accusations of Jews’ sexuality/carnality and their misguided textual interpretation. We can learn from this ancient case study about the ways in which the representation of a group as sexually heretical is used to justify the use of force against that group.

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Heather Boushey, “Finding Time: The Economies of Work-Life Conflict” (Harvard UP, 2016) Apr 04, 2016

Show notes

Heather Boushey has written Finding Time: The Economies of Work-Life Conflict (Harvard University Press, 2016). Boushey is Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

How should policy-makers respond to the fact that women now make at least a quarter of the earnings in more than two-thirds of families with children and, in many households, women bring in more than half of the earned income? In Finding Time, Boushey offers a round-map for policy-makers to adjust social policy for these positive changes in the economy and U.S. workforce. Paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, scheduling predictability, limiting overwork, and elder care are all options on the agenda that many states and localities have implemented. Boushey argues for a more comprehensive approach to social policy that draws on what has been learned about effective policy making and the reality of the 21st century economy.

This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown.

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Daniel K. Williams, “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade” (Oxford UP, 2016) Apr 01, 2016

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of West Georgia. His book, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers the origins of the pro-life movement not as reactionary and anti-feminist, but rather as a New Deal-inspired crusade for human rights and part of a progressive Catholic social agenda. Pro-lifers saw themselves as crusaders for the “right to life” appealing to natural law and the constitution of the United States. In the 1930s they stood against the utilitarian views of abortion liberalization promoted by secular doctors. After World War II Catholic doctors and lawyers were equating abortion with the holocaust and arguing for the fetus as protected by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In the early 1960s, the debate over abortion moved to legislative and constitutional battles. Restrictive state laws began to crumble and post-Vatican Catholic opposition to abortion continued to erode among the laity. The decade ended with a restructuring of the movement as it gained allies among young progressives, anti-war activists, Protestants and evangelicals. Pro-life women, expressing a feminism of difference, became visible in the leadership ranks in what had been a virtually an all-male public campaign. The pro-life movement’s legislative victories were short term. Roe v. Wade and change in public opinion interrupted the ascendancy of the pro-life movement and its bipartisan identity to become part of a larger cultural battle. Williams offers an important contribution by highlighting the progressive origins of the pro-life movement before it became a conservative evangelical cause and an issue that continues to divide the nation.

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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Tahneer Oksman, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” (Columbia UP, 2016) Mar 24, 2016

Show notes

In “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), Tahneer Oksman explores the graphic memoirs of seven female cartoonists, whose works grapple with issues of Jewish identity – from confronting stereotypes of Jewish women’s bodies and behaviors, to ambivalence over what it means to be a progressive Jew on a Birthright trip to Israel. Through visual and textual analysis, Oksman illustrates how her authors’ connections to Jewishness remain complicated, fluid, and intimately tied to perceptions of self and how others view them.

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Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Gut Feminism” (Duke UP, 2015) Mar 07, 2016

Show notes

Elizabeth A. Wilson‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of science studies and feminist theory. In its introduction, Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2015) lays out two major ambitions: it seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to how biological data can be used to think about minded and bodily states,” and seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to thinking about the hostility intrinsic to our politics.” The book shows that the gut is an organ of the mind via an exploration of melancholia, depression, some fascinating psychoanalytic literature, and contemporary conversations and debates about psychopharmaceuticals. Wilson’s book unflattens biology, offering an incredibly helpful way to think about anatomy as an ever-changing site of entanglement that enacts “malleability, heterogeneity, friction, and unpredictability.” Highly recommended!

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Keren R. McGinity, “Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood” (Indiana UP, 2014) Feb 08, 2016

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In Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood (Indiana University Press, 2014), Keren R. McGinity, founding director of the Love and Tradition Institute and a Research Associate at Brandeis University, seeks to challenge the common assumption that when American Jewish men intermarry, they and their families are “lost” to the Jewish religion. McGinity explores the challenges and expectations intermarried Jewish men face as they strive to be good husbands and to raise their children Jewish. Her analysis reminds us more broadly that “gendered” studies should look at women and men’s experiences.

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Jessica Martucci, “Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Feb 03, 2016

Show notes

Jessica Martucci‘s fascinating new book traces the emergence, rise, and continued practice of breastfeeding in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks at the lives and work of scientists, nurses, medical researchers, lay groups, doctors, and mothers to understand the shifting meanings of breastfeeding since the 1930s. Early chapters that explore the construction of a modern ideology of “natural motherhood” in the “psy-ences” and beyond, and look carefully at the medical profession’s interest in breastfeeding in the early-mid twentieth century. The next chapters consider the roles that women played – as mothers and nurses – in the survival of the practice through the midcentury, and consider the rise of lay organizations like La Leche League. The last chapters of the book follow the development and rise of breast pump technology and the “professionalization of breastfeeding expertise,” and consider how the events chronicled in the book continue to shape mothers’ experiences with breastfeeding, suggesting ways for addressing the “ongoing tensions surrounding” arguments that mothers should go “back to the breast.” It is a wonderfully readable and carefully researched study that I highly recommend!

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Michelle Chase, “Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962” (UNC Press, 2015) Feb 03, 2016

Show notes

This episode features Michelle Chase, who joins us to discuss her fascinating new book, Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). The book is a rich and nuanced history of women’s participation in the movements of resistance that began in the immediate aftermath of Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’etat in 1952—resistance that culminated in the overthrow of Batista in the Cuban revolution of 1959. Eschewing both official top-down narratives of women’s liberation as well as anti-communist accounts of women’s cooptation, Revolution Within the Revolution demonstrates that women’s activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process. It also centers urban activism in the years leading up to the Cuban Revolution, and reveals how focusing on the city changes our understanding of how the Revolution evolved and triumphed. What’s more, the book is also a history of how notions of gender roles in Cuba at midcentury—questions of marriage and family, of masculinity and femininity—were both defined by and came to define the revolutionary moment, dialectically shaping the strategy of both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, men and women alike.

Michelle Chase is an Assistant Professor of History at Bloomfield College, where she teaches courses on Latin American and Caribbean History and World History. You can follow her on Twitter at @michaymicha.

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Domna Stanton, “The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing” (Ashgate, 2014) Jan 28, 2016

Show notes

Domna Stanton‘s latest book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (Ashgate, 2014) is a series of six case studies with important literary, historical, and theoretical implications for how we think about gender in the seventeenth century and beyond. In two parts, the first focused on male and the second focused on female writers in this period, the book examines critically key works by Racine, FÃ©nelon, Poulain de la Barre, La Guette, La Fayette and SÃ©vignÃ©. In close readings that situate authors and texts within a broader historical context, Stanton examines gender as a dynamic, relational construct across multiple genres, including drama in its comic and tragic forms, letters, treatise, novella, and memoir. Departing from the premise that the querelle des femmes must also be understood as a querelle des hommes, The Dynamics of Gender is concerned throughout with women and men, femininity and masculinity, writers and the written-about.

Drawing on and engaging with the critical theoretical work and insights of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, The Dynamics of Gender makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how gender and power work and shift in and across texts and time. This is a book about bodies and/of writing that pursues important questions about what it meant to write as men and women historically, and about what “reading-as-a-feminist” might mean into the present and future.

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