New Books in Gender

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Nicholas De Villiers, “Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Jan 11, 2013

Show notes

In his book, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Nicholas de Villiers takes up an examination of the work of the three titular authors as a way of understanding their queerness and more specifically, how each man subverted the “in-and-out of the closet” paradigm. De Villiers devotes ample time to each man, however I found his thoughts on Foucault and Barthes of particular importance as both have come to be so deeply associated with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and queer theory. It is safe to say that Foucault is in large part responsible for the theoretical and philosophical foundations of what we know of today as queer theory and queer studies. This fact makes Foucault’s own relationship with his “out” sexuality all the more fascinating and de Villiers does a great service to Foucault, showing that Foucault himself subverted the “in-and-out of the closet” paradigm and society’s need to ferret out and make known our sexualities. While many scholars, academics, and cultural critics have criticized Foucault for his “silence,” de Villiers’s work suggests that Foucault’s life was a practice in complicating and disrupting the immense societal desire to see homosexuality expressed in one sanctioned way. De Villiers work here is deep, insightful, and refreshing in its attempt to offer an alternative to “suspicious reading.” I do hope you enjoy our conversation.

Photo Credit: Lauren M. Jones

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John K. Roth and Carol Rittner, “Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide” (Paragon House, 2012) Jan 10, 2013

Show notes

While reading about genocide and mass violence should always be be disturbing, a certain numbness sets in over time. Every once in a while, however, a book breaks through that numbness to remind the reader of the horror inherent in the subject.

The new book Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide, edited by John Roth and Carol Rittner (Paragon House, 2012) is one of these books. While individuals have always committed or fell victim to sexual violence during conflicts, only recently have armies and states begun to use large-scale rape as a tactic to help them achieve their broader war aims. Rittner and Roth set out to explore why and how this is happening and to identify possible solutions to the problem. Some of the essays are academic, some personal, but they all contain horrifying reminders of the intensely personal experience of rape and sexual violence. Aimed at students as well as professionals, the book offers a broad survey of the state of research rather than overarching conclusions. In doing so, it sears its way into your consciousness.

John and Carol have the kind of easy familiarity that comes from having worked together for decades. The result is more a conversation than an interview. I threw in some guiding questions, but mostly sat back and enjoyed the chance to hear two experts talk with each other about a subject of pressing importance. I hope you’ll appreciate the chance to do the same.

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Sikivu Hutchinson, “Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars” (Infidel Books, 2011) Dec 13, 2012

Show notes

Sikivu Hutchinson‘s book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books, 2011) is a brave examination of African American religious perspectives vis a vis progressive racial politics, gender relations, and cultural values. She tackles uncomfortable questions about the possibly excessive role of religiosity among African Americans, especially woman. And she wonders even as she offers a critique about the abundance of storefront churches in communities that need essential resources. Why so many churches? Why so few activist cultural institutions?

A prolific cultural critic and writer, Hutchinson received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts and Western Washington University. She is also the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Lang, 2003) and has published fiction, essays and critical theory in Social Text, California English, Black Agenda Report, Free Inquiry and American Atheist Magazine. She is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies. Readers can also look forward to the publication of her latest project, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels. But for now, enjoy our conversation about Moral Combat.

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Russell Martin, “A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage in Early Modern Russia” (NIU Press, 2012) Nov 29, 2012

Show notes

You probably know the story about the king who issues a call for the most beautiful girls in the land to be presented to him as potential brides in a kind of “bride-show.” And you might think this is just a myth. But actually it’s not. As Russell Martin shows in his wonderful A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage in Early Modern Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), early modern Russians actually held bride-shows when selecting a mate for the tsar. They brought potential brides to Moscow, had their health checked (fertility was an obvious concern), and investigated their backgrounds. Yet, as Russ points out, the Muscovite bride-shows were as much propaganda as they were mechanisms to select tsarinas. Muscovy was an autocracy comprised of closed castes. Only the tsar could raise subjects out of one caste and into another. The bride-shows were the most visible and valuable example of the tsar’s power to arbitrarily change a subject’s fortune. In reality the bride-shows were rigged. The tsar and his advisors only considered certain young women from certain castes and belonging to certain families as potential brides. Russ explains exactly why and how the brides were chosen and what the bride-shows tell us about the nature of the early modern Russian political system.

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Dan Healey, “Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939” (Northern Illinois UP, 2009) Nov 26, 2012

Show notes

I have long been an admirer of Dan Healey‘s work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important contribution our understanding of the history of homosexuality; Healey’s new book follows logically from his previous one. In Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), he takes us from the establishment of a gay identity and community to the new Russian state as it seeks to define its position vis a vis sexuality. With the Bolshevik revolution, revolutionaries decided to modernize Russian sexual science and beliefs. Russian sexual scientists were already in conversation with their Western European colleagues and sought to modernize and rationalize sexual relations between women and men. Policy makers introduced a number of reforms to aid in the process of modernization. They abolished the age of consent, for instance, and replaced it with an age of maturity. Bolsheviks also envisioned a modern role for science in the new Russian state – one that brought the psychiatrists into the justice system. These new sexual experts began to link sex crimes to mental disease, described and diagnosed sexual psychopathy, and they began a systematic investigation of the bodies of hermaphrodites. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics discusses these developments and their impact on sexual beliefs and the regulation of sexuality. Given the archival record, Healey does not attempt to predict how these changes influenced sexual experience. Court records, he notes, are largely silence on the impact that “modern visions” of sexuality had on young rape victims, for instance. Instead, Healey does what the records allow him to do: trace the changing role of sexual experts and sexual science of people of the young Russian nation tried to distance themselves from the old tsarist beliefs – yet lapsed over and over again into traditional notions of sexuality. Listen as Dan Healey tells us about his new book, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics.

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Juliane Hammer, “American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer” (University of Texas Press, 2012) Nov 11, 2012

Show notes

In 2005, Amina Wadud led a mixed-gender congregation of Muslims in prayer. This event became the focal point of substantial media attention and highlighted some of the tensions within the Muslim community. However, this prayer gathering was the culmination of a series of events and embodied several ongoing intra-Muslim debates. In American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (University of Texas Press, 2012), Juliane Hammer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, outlines the circumstances leading up to the prayer event and employs it as point of convergence to explore the multiple discourses surrounding Muslim gender issues. The debates following the prayer fell into two discursive frameworks, legal and symbolic. Hammer explores these themes through a broader body of sources written by American Muslim women both in relation to exegetical projects or legalistic frameworks leading towards gender equality or human rights. While gender remains central to the arguments of the book Hammer uses this subject to examine various issues related to contemporary Islam, including participation, leadership, law, media, and self-representation. In our conversation, we discuss the disintegration of traditional modes of authority, “progressive” Muslims, embodied tafsir, feminism, the permissibility and validity of women lead prayer, the hijab, book covers, mosques, networks, Asra Nomani, and Amina Wadud, but are only able to scratch the surface of this wonderful book.

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Andrei Markovits and Emily Albertson, “Sportista: Female Fandom in the United States” (Temple University Press, 2012) Nov 09, 2012

Show notes

My wife is a sports fan. Together, we have cheered from the stands at college football games and track meets, for local minor-league baseball clubs and hockey teams. We’ve spent Sunday afternoons watching the National Football League, October nights watching the World Series, and summer afternoons watching the World Cup. We once waited in line for hours for tickets to the national college basketball tournament, and another time we awoke in the early-morning darkness, while living in Europe, to watch the live broadcast of the Olympic hockey final. She has cheered, groaned, jumped from her seat in excitement, and slumped in despair. But now, after lifetime of following sports, she has declared that her days as a fan are coming to an end. What has brought this turn away from sports? It’s not the outrageous salaries or loutish behavior of athletes. It’s not scandals or cheating or excess. It’s her sons–our sons. At ages 14 and 11, our boys talk sports constantly. And they talk in obsessive detail, like typical males: statistics, standings, predictions, post-game analyses, historical debates, and hypothetical speculations. For my wife, who has been an athlete and a fan since childhood, the incessant talk is more than she can bear.

My wife’s dilemma is common to female sports fans. As Andy Markovits and Emily Albertson explain in their new book, female fans think and talk about sports in a vastly different way than do male fans. Even the most avid women fans, whom Andy and Emily call “sportistas,” do not debate potential transfer signings, or recite from memory the announcer’s call from a classic match, or quiz each other on starting lineups from decades ago. Unfortunately, however, women who follow sports find that male fans use these kinds of conversations as an entrance requirement to their circle. “You don’t know who hit the winning home run in the 1960 World Series! How can you be a REAL fan?!!” Yet, even when a woman does know the name Bill Mazeroski, she still is not accepted. Instead, the male fan sees her as a threat.

Sportista: Female Fandom in the United States (Temple University Press, 2012) looks at the barriers that women fans face as they follow sports. Andy and Emily discuss the different ways that males and females talk about and consume sports and the roots of those differences. Their conclusions, based on interviews with women fans and sports journalists, match what my wife has discovered in our household. For her, sports are drama and entertainment and a spectacle of human accomplishment. For our sons, sports is life.

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Mary Johnson, “An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service and an Authentic Life” (Spiegel & Grau, 2011) Nov 04, 2012

Show notes

In December of 1975, Agnes Bojaxhiu, also known as Mother Teresa, appeared on the cover of TIME magazine with a caption that read: “Living Saints.” Mary Johnson, a teenage girl at the time, saw this cover and was drawn in by what she saw as a wonderful life of meaning, love, and service. Two years later, she had joined the Missionaries of Charity, the religious community that Mother Teresa started in 1948, and there remained for 20 years. Though she fervently wanted to be a good nun, she found that the rules imposed upon the Sisters were often oppressive, unkind and unnecessary. In her memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service and an Authentic Life (Spiegel and Grau, 2011), Mary takes us on her journey as a Missionary of Charity, judging kindly but not failing to criticize the community – and the Church – that was her life for many years. Though now a humanist and writer in the secular world, Mary shares with us what it was like to be a nun in what she calls the “Marines” of the Catholic Church, and how, far from the idolized saintly image most have of her, Mother Teresa was indeed as human as the rest of us.

You can find out more about Mary and the Missionaries of Charity at her website.

Audio Interview Below

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Julietta Hua, “Trafficking Women’s Human Rights” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) Oct 13, 2012

Show notes

In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Julietta Hua analyzes how discourse on human trafficking creates the boundaries of victimhood and thereby restricts concepts of punishment, remedy, and citizenship. Analyzing legislation, public discourse, and interview materials, Dr. Hua traces how gender, nationality, and racial identities become inscribed into the concept of sex trafficking. The subject matter is heavy, but Dr. Hua presents a delightfully rigorous theoretical framework, careful interpretation of proffered data, and poignant illustrations.

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Karen Ruffle, “Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism” (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) Oct 10, 2012

Show notes

What does a wedding in Karbala in the year 680 have to do with South Asian Muslims today? As it turns out, this event informs contemporary ideas of personal piety and social understanding of gender roles. The battlefield wedding of Qasem and Fatimah Kubra on 7 Muharram is commemorated annually by Hyderabadi Shi’a Muslims. In Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Karen Ruffle, Assistant Professor of History of Religions and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, explores the relationship between devotional literature and ritual practice in the formulation of social consciousness and embodied ethics. She accomplishes this task through great ethnographic detail and deep investigation into a rich literary tradition of devotional hagiographical texts. Ruffle argues that hagiography when enacted through contemporary ritual performances establishes typologies of Shi’i sainthood. Altogether, these localized models of ethics and gendered normativity reflect the realities of the religiously plural geographies Hyderabadi Shi’a Muslims inhabit. In our conversation, we discuss annual mourning assemblies, Husaini ethics, imitable sainthood, gender roles, martyrdom and kinship, the relationship between texts and performance, The Garden of the Martyrs, vernacular and cosmopolitan Islams, sectarian affiliation and religious identity, and the homogenization of Shi’ism.

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