New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Julie Berebitsky, “Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire” (Yale University Press, 2012) Dec 11, 2013

Show notes

How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives to trial records, congressional investigation files to films and novels, popular weeklies and dailies to postcards, advertisements to confession magazines, private papers to employment advice guides — Julie Berebitsky takes the reader on a discovery of sexuality in the white collar-office from the Civil War to the present day.

Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire (Yale University Press, 2012) analyzes sexual relations, non-consensual and consensual, among co-workers, arguing that the 19th-century ideal of the passionless woman gave way by World War One to an ideal of feminine attractiveness, one that was later transformed by Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s into a professional strategy for its time. At the same time, feminist groups and the secretarial labor movement coalesced to fight back against decades of discrimination and sexual violence in the office against women workers. Berebitsky concludes her book with an analysis of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case, which brought the issue of sexual harassment into the living rooms of Americans. This case, and the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton affair, demonstrate that there is both continuity and change in American attitudes towards sex at the office.

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

Emily Matchar, “Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity” (Simon and Schuster, 2013) Dec 05, 2013

Show notes

A couple of years ago I was living in a hip district of a university town in the Midwest. It had all the hip stuff you’d expect: a record store (and I mean record store), a big used bookstore, a greasy spoon, two dive bars, a coffee shop, and two...

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

Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Nov 27, 2013

Show notes

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the twentieth century, most answers to this question were rather unsatisfying, unless of course you like your answers religio-mythical or pseudo-scientific. Then scientists discovered a genetic difference that seemed to correspond to sexual dimorphism: the 23rd pair of chromosomes was XX in (almost all) human females and XY in (almost all) human males. Thus was a research program born, one prefect for the age of molecular genetics: the search for “sex itself.”

In her fascinating book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Sarah S. Richardson explores the ways in which molecular geneticists pursued this program and, just as importantly, the ways in which their “findings” were molded by contemporary attitudes toward sex and gender. The science we see in Sex Itself is not just about “the facts”; it’s about facts embedded in culture. She shows how the two–sexual science and culture–did a sort of dance, each leading the other about the floor of public discourse. Sometimes the dance is beautiful; other times the dancers stumble all over each other. Listen in to our lively discussion.

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

Ken MacLeish, “Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community” (Princeton UP, 2013) Nov 12, 2013

Show notes

Ken MacLeish offers an ethnographic look at daily lives and the true costs borne by soldiers, their families, and communities, in his new book Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013). His intimate exploration of military lives makes salient the numerous and often contradictory ways that war enters into the everyday lives of soldiers and their families in Killeen, Texas. MacLeish begins by defining the site of research–Fort Hood is one of the largest military installations in the world, and many of the 55,000 personnel based there have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He then moves to an intense and palpable examination of the embodied experience of being a soldier, making a striking argument that “war persist in the lives, bodies and social worlds it has touched” (4).

Thus, he connects the experiences of the body and the mind, exploring both physical and mental pain and the issues that surround the pursuit of healing. Moreover, he analyzes the complex burdens placed on people’s relationships and the love that binds them in contradictory ways through the ins and outs of military life. The final chapters examine the gap between obligations and exchange in relation to the value of a soldier’s labor, showing how they materialize in different aspects of soldiers’ lives from the “burden of gratitude” to the overdistribution, and hence devaluation, of medals and honors. Interweaving brutally honest narratives with critical theory and anthropological analysis, MacLeish invites us to re-examine the condition of vulnerability pervasive in the words and lives of soldiers and their families in Fort Hood, fleshing out the myriad ways in which military life is always mired in the production of war, at home and abroad.

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

Matthew L. Basso, “Meet Joe Copper: Maculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Nov 09, 2013

Show notes

In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Generation,” as opposed to lesser generations, I suppose. Now most of the Americans of “The Greatest Generation” who fought in “The Good War” were men. What made them the “greatest” was that they had proved not only their willingness pro patria mori, but also their masculinity. They were, well, “real men.”

But what about those American men who, though of “The Greatest Generation,” did not actually fight in “The Good War?” There were millions of them. Early in the war Washington designated certain industries essential to the war effort and therefore exempted those who worked in them from the draft. These men “fought” on the Home Front, of course. But they knew very well that fighting on the “Home Front” was not the same as fighting on the actual front. As men of fighting age but not fighting, they were the object of a certain skepticism. “Why,” they imagined people asking, “weren’t they in uniform?” Maybe they weren’t “real men…”

In his path-breaking new book Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Matthew L. Basso explores the ways in which American men on the “Home Front” protected their masculinity during the War, and the ways in which those efforts reverberated in the decades that followed it. It’s a fascinating story. Listen in.

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

David Bleich, “The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University” (Indiana UP, 2013) Nov 07, 2013

Show notes

David Bleich‘s book The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics and the University (Indiana University Press, 2013) is described as a wide-ranging critique of academic practice, which is almost an understatement. From the point of view of someone working in linguistics as (at least in principle) a scientific discipline, his thesis is interesting and provocative. He argues forcefully for the relevance of language, construed as a material entity, across a wide range of disciplines (and to life in general), and challenges the focus on treating language as a cognitive phenomenon and studying it in abstract terms.

In this interview, I resist the temptation to take up a defensive position on behalf of cognitive linguists. Instead, we talk about the role of academic history in shaping current scientific practice, and the possible consequences of that for power dynamics, with particular reference to gender. And we look at some of things the study of language might contribute to – for want of a less ambitious term – the future well-being of humanity.

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

Jonathan D. Wells, “Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South” (Cambridge UP, 2011) Oct 23, 2013

Show notes

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging.

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

Gayle Kaufman, “Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century” (NYU Press, 2013) Sep 19, 2013

Show notes

Pretty much every day you can read an article–usually somewhat intemperate–about how women can or can’t “have it all.” Rarely, however, do you read anything about the way in which men try to balance work and family. The assumption seems to be that fathers either: a) don’t want to “balance” anything; or b)say they want to “balance” work and family but actually don’t, or don’t try very hard to bring it off.

As Gayle Kaufman points out in her terrific new book Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2013), both of these assumptions are, well, wrong. Most American fathers want to play an active role in their family’s lives, and particularly in the rearing of their children. They face the same challenge as their working wives: how to have rich working lives and nurture their families all at the same time. In Superdads, Kaufman tries to figure out how and to what extent they are finding a good “balance.” Her answers are sobering for those wishing to “have it all.” In the lives of most men, somethings got to give. Listen to the interview and find out what.

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

Mishuana Goeman, “Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Sep 02, 2013

Show notes

The maps drawn up by early settlers to plot their inexorable expansion were not the first representations of North American space. Colonialism does not simply impose a new reality, after all, but attempts to shatter and discard whole systems of understanding. Indigenous maps preceded the colonial encounter and indigenous maps persist is this extended colonial moment.

In Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Mishuana Goeman finds in the poetry and prose of Native women authors the maps of both colonialism’s persistence and resistance to its ongoing containments. Goeman shows how writers like E. Pauline Johnson, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Heid Erdrich point toward a Native future beyond the settler models of territory, jurisdiction, and race.

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

Bruce Reis and Robert Grossmark, eds., “Heterosexual Masculinities” (Routledge, 2009) Aug 12, 2013

Show notes

Here at New Books in Psychoanalysis we are celebrating the Summer of Men! We continue our inquiry into the topic of masculinity in psychoanalytic thought as we converse with Robert Grossmark and Bruce Reis about Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory (Routledge, 2009). The book is devoted to rethinking notions of male heterosexuality from within a psychoanalytic standpoint. Often in the field we think of boys as becoming masculinized by repudiating their identification with their mothers and the female world. This collection of essays begs to differ; boys never give up those identifications and it may be to their benefit that they do not do so.

This collection argues that straight guys have been, in a certain way, fall guys–the ones in which other, more marginalized identities, define themselves in opposition to. So what happens when the known quantity proves to be less knowable? This is some of the terrain taken up by this book. Also discussed here are the pre-oedipal father, as well as the fate of the father’s body and its erotic components, alongside a discussion considering the possibility of the development of interiority and inner genital space in men.

In this interview, the authors explore the paradigm shifts afoot in the field and the ramifications for clinical work that are expectable as a result. The authors exude both seriousness and playfulness as regards their subject matter, making for a perfect August respite (for the analyst on hiatus) and for some pleasurable and moving listening for the rest of us.

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