New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France” May 29, 2014

Show notes

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013) such an interesting read in 2014. In this detailed study of the varied economic, political, social, and cultural meanings and practices of “credit” from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century, Crowston draws our attention to mutually constitutive worlds and systems of circulation. At once a genealogy of credit; an economic, social, and cultural history of fashion; and an examination of the roles of gender and desire in Old Regime France, Credit, Fashion, Sex makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the French Revolution while respecting the historical integrity of the period that came before.

In addition to its conceptual and historiographical insights regarding credit and the complexities of Old Regime society, the book offers readers a fascinating and extensively-researched analysis of the everyday practices and systems of exchange that operated “behind the scenes” of more familiar stories. For example, the book illuminates the mythology and critiques surrounding Marie Antoinette, the queen who embodied like no one else the intersection between ideas about credit, fashion, and sexuality in the era before 1789. At the same time, Crowston gives us a glimpse of other figures and social actors who played vital roles in the society of the period: Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker; the fashion merchants who made so much luxury and refinement possible, as well as all those wives not married to Louis XVI who traded on/in their husbands’ credit, participating in multiple economic and cultural systems of circulation and power.

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

Denise Brennan, “Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States” (Duke UP, 2014) May 20, 2014

Show notes

Denise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go about rebuilding their lives afterward. Through her ethnography of lived experience and her analysis of immigration policy, Brennan shows that trafficking and forced labor are common byproducts of our capitalist system that relies on cheap and unregulated labor. Migration patterns are gendered, and the persons whose experiences shape this book — Maria, Elsa, and many others — are mostly women in the caregiving and sex industries. Brennan argues that U.S. policy has used anti-trafficking policy to forward a separate agenda of ending prostitution and other sex work, thereby distorting protections for female and male trafficking victims in all labor industries, and drastically limiting the number of T visas allocated since 2000. The book is one of scholarly activism: as an anthropologist, Denise Brennan combines research and advocacy to improve the lives of victims and to modify the realities of trafficking and forced labor.

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

Paula A. Michaels, “Lamaze: An International History” (Oxford UP, 2014) May 16, 2014

Show notes

The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, doctors started to “medicalize” childbirth. Physicians began to think of ways to ease the pain of childbirth.

Two main options were explored. One–drugs–is quite familiar to us, for it is the primary tool used by doctors to make women comfortable during the birth process today. The other–“psychoprophylaxis”–has now passed into memory. The most famous form of psychoprophylaxis, and the subject of Paula A. Michaels’ excellent book Lamaze: An International History (Oxford University Press, 2014), is known as the “Lamaze method.” Its history is fascinating and surprising: born in the Soviet Union (or was it the United Kingdom?), it migrated to France, and then to much of Europe. It then jumped the Atlantic and became a quasi-political force in the United States (“natural childbirth”). And Lamaze is still with us, though in a form hard to recognize. Listen in.

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

Michael Salter, “Organised Sexual Abuse” (Routledge, 2012) May 07, 2014

Show notes

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how certain types of violence can occur, and organized multi-perpetrator abuse certainly fits into this category. Ritual abuse, sadistic abuse and pedophilia rings are often things we see in episodes of “Law and Order,” without having to think of the reality of the victims that actually experience this type of cruelty. In Organised Sexual Abuse (Routledge, 2013), Michael Salter attempts to bring to light this often-hidden and seldom-believed type of crime. He describes his own experience being the caretaker of someone who was continuously abused and harassed well into adulthood, including his attempts to reach out to law enforcement and hospital workers, most of whom had trouble believing that this kind of abuse was actually taking place. Salter also talks about the connection between views of hypermasculinity and abuse, and the ways in which violence is often a “collective masculine performance.” Through in-depth qualitative research, Salter takes us, he proposes, into a horrifying journey of a reality that we cannot afford to ignore.

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

Kristin Lieb “Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry” (Routledge, 2013) May 03, 2014

Show notes

It is a challenge for all musicians to find success in the modern music industry, but women face unique challenges. Cultural narratives shape how female artists get sold to the public and those narratives, in turn, affect how the public consumes the music of these women artists.

Kristin Lieb examines the business decisions that shape the careers of female pop artists. Her book, Gender, Branding and the Modern Music Industry (Routledge, 2013),explores this terrain and develops a lifecycle model for female artists. This model describes how many female artists enter pop music as “good girls” only later to become “temptresses,” which then can transform into a range of possible branding options from “divas” and “exotics” to “whores” and “hot messes.” Lieb developed this model by interviewing the business managers, marketers, and agents who are shaping how artists get branded and marketed.

In the interview, Lieb applies this model to a wide range of artists from Miley Cyrus and Lorde to Adele and Madonna. She offers tremendous insight about how behind the scenes business and marketing decisions shape the artists that become successful

Dr. Kristin Lieb is an assistant professor of marketing communication at Emerson College. Before coming a professor, she worked as a freelancer for Billboard and Rolling Stone and worked as a marketing executive for several music-related companies.

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

Sa’diyya Shaikh, “Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) Apr 29, 2014

Show notes

Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) she explores contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership, sexuality and power in order to rethink patriarchal epistemologies in contemporary Muslim discourses. She argues that contesting positions on gender in these debates are underpinned by certain assumptions about human nature, its gendering, and existence. Shaikh outlines the social and ritual consequences of spiritual (in)equality and initiates reflections on Islamic notions of the central category “human being.” Shaikh leads us through Ibn ‘Arabi’s dynamic anthropology, ontology, and cosmology and links abstract philosophical concepts with concrete daily relationships between men and women. In our conversation we discussed Islamic feminism, apophatic unsayings and hermeneutic of subversions, Ibn ‘Arabi’s interpersonal relationships with women, parallels between the macrocosm and microcosm, Muslim exegesis, notions of creation, interpretations of Adam and Eve, Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, and masculine and feminine in Islam.

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

Michelle King, “Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China” (Stanford UP, 2014) Apr 26, 2014

Show notes

Michelle King‘s new book explores the intertwined histories of imperialism and infanticide. Situating the histories of infant killing and abandonment in China within a broader history of these practices in western Europe and across Eurasia, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford UP, 2014) thus wrests the notion of female infanticide from an uncritical identification with a historical or imagined “China.” Instead of assuming this identification, King’s book asks when female infanticide became “Chinese,” and uses the chapters of Between Birth and Death to introduce readers to a fascinating archive of texts, images, memoirs, morality plays, scientific treatises, monuments, catechisms, devotional cards, newspaper articles, and other materials that forms the substratum from which changing perceptions of female infanticide were born and transformed through the nineteenth century and beyond. King offers sympathetic readings of the motivations of a wide spectrum of individuals, from women who chose to drown their daughters to philanthropic activists within and beyond China who fought against the practice, to children who donated pennies from their allowance to ensure that Chinese babies would be baptized. It is a balanced, clearly written, and persuasively argued account of an exceptionally timely topic that deserves a wide readership.

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

Lynne Huffer, “Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex” (Columbia University Press, 2013) Apr 23, 2014

Show notes

In her fourth book, Lynne Huffer argues for a restored queer feminism to find new ways of thinking about sex and about ethics. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia University Press, 2013) brings forth a breadth of sources — known and less well-known, French and American, primary and secondary — ranging from Colette, Violette Leduc, and Marcel Proust to the book of Genesis, from Supreme Court cases to Virginie Despentes’ rape-revenge film Baise-moi, from Irigaray to Foucault, through which Huffer reads and writes toward a queer feminist future. Beautifully written and stimulating for the theorist and non-theorist alike, Huffer’s new book combines the personal and the scholarly in experimental ways, such as her analysis of the Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham story. Carefully navigating the couloirs of queer and feminist theory, this is a book about sexuality, ethics, alterity, betrayal, and love.

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

Ayesha Chaudhry, “Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition” (Oxford University Press, 2013) Mar 29, 2014

Show notes

How do people make sense of their scriptures when they do not align with the way they envision these texts? This problem is faced by many contemporary believers and is especially challenging in relation to passages that go against one’s vision of a gender egalitarian cosmology. Ayesha Chaudhry, professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, examines one such passage from the Qur’an, verse 4:34, which has traditionally been interpreted to give husbands disciplinary rights over their wives, including hitting them. In Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (Oxford University Press, 2013) Chaudhry offers a historical genealogy of pre-colonial and post-colonial interpretations of this verse and their implications. Through her presentation she offers portraits of the “Islamic Tradition” and how these visions of authority shape participants’ readings of scripture. In our conversation we discuss the ethics of discipline, idealized cosmologies, marital relationships, legal interpretations, Muhammad’s embodied model, Muslim feminist discourses, effects of colonialism, and the hermeneutical space between modernity and tradition.

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

Karma Chavez, “Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities” (Illinois University Press, 2013) Mar 10, 2014

Show notes

Karma Chavez is the author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Illinois University Press, 2013). Dr. Chavez is assistant professor of Communication Arts and Chicano and Latina Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network and co-editor of Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices Feminist Practices in Communications Studies.

Queer Migration Politics focuses on the intersection of political interest between immigration activists and LGBT activists. Chavez shows some of the inclusionary approaches taken by mainstream groups to advocate for a small handful of common policy objectives. The campaign to change US law to permit gay and lesbian citizens to sponsor foreign partners was prominent on the agenda. But Chavez’s approach challenges conventional politics by offering a “differential vision” of what coalitional politics might mean. The book has a lot for political scientists and sociologists, as well as scholars in queer studies and immigration policy.

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