New Books in Gender

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Jennifer Guglielmo, “Living in Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City” (UNC Press, 2010) Oct 10, 2012

Show notes

There is exactly one strong woman in the movie “The Godfather,” and she’s not Italian. (It’s “Kay Adams,” played by the least Italian-looking actress alive, Diane Keaton.) Such is the stereotype about Italian women, at least in the U.S. They are always in the background, sometimes cooking for la famiglia, sometimes counting rosary beads, sometimes simply missing (as in the case of “The Godfather” films). Alas, it’s all wrong. In her pathbreaking book Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Smith College historian Jennifer Guglielmo dives into the archives to show that before the First World War Italian women were at the forefront of radical, predominantly socialist politics in the New York City region. They organized parties and unions; protested and marched for fairness and against injustice; they struck and stood fast on the picket line; they wrote and published newspapers, flyers and books. And, in their daily lives, they tried as best they could to “live the Revolution.” As Jennifer points out, though, Italian women had to adapt. The ways they did so involved becoming both American and “white.” It’s a fascinating story remarkably well told. I urge you to read it.

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Elizabeth Reis, “Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009) Sep 26, 2012

Show notes

In August of 2009, the South African runner Caster Semenya won the 800 meter final in the world Championship leading by one minute. “Muscles bulging and triumphant hand aloft,” the news reported, “she crossed the line way ahead of the rest of the field and ran straight into accusations that she was far too strong, too fast and, to be blunt, too masculine to be a woman.” The International Association of Athletics Federation requested that Semenya undergo gender testing. For months, Semenya and the IAAF awaited reports from a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist, an internal medicine specialist, and an expert on gender. When the results were finally released, news headlines ranged from “Caster Semenya is a hermaphrodite with no womb or ovaries” in the Sydney Daily Telegraph to Salon.com’s claim that “Castor Semenya is not a hermaphrodite…but intersex.” This news must have come as a shock to Semenya. Today we are going to talk to Elizabeth Reis, author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). A women’s and Gender Studies scholar and Historian at the University of Oregon, Reis tells us about the history of those who are of ambiguous sex. From early America, when people looked at doubtful bodies as bodies that created legal and religious concern to the 19th century, when physicians began to take over the classification and management of bodies lacking a clear gender identity. This is a remarkable book. And we are glad to have Elizabeth Reis on our show today.

The shock with which Semenya – and others like her — must have received this news – as well as the debate over the proper nomenclatura concerning individuals who show sex characteristics of both men and women are among the fascinating topics raised by Elizabeth Reis’ book

Reis, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at the University of Oregon, analyzes the history of bodies of doubtful gender from early America to the present. Her narrative illustrates how anomalous bodies were initially associated with monstrous births, of concern mostly to legal and clerical authorities. In the 19th century, physicians began to take over the classification of doubtful bodies. Soon, they were involved not only in identifying the sex of their patients’ bodies but also in altering doubtful bodies to create gender certainties. Reis traces the rise and fall of medical treatment protocols for the intersex. She concludes with a thoughtful chapter on naming in which she discusses the move away from the term hermaphrodite – which evoked images of mythical creatures and was considered derogatory. Hermaphrodite was followed by the term intersex. But to many, this term seemed too sexualized. It also suggested the existence of a third sex – when many really only wanted two. Recently, physicians have begun to use Disorders of Sex Development [DSD] to refer to the intersex condition. The Disorders in DSD, however, pathologizes the condition. Reis herself suggests Divergence of Sex Development as a more neutral option. If nothing else, the evolution of terminology itself illustrates how sensitive and political the naming and categorizing of gender is. Bodies in Doubt is a terrific contribution to our understanding of sex, gender, and the creation of our two gender system. If you are as fascinated with these issues as I am, you must read this book.

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Amy Stanley, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2012) Sep 19, 2012

Show notes

With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions about seemingly basic categories like marriage, freedom, and sex. It also maps the ways that the spaces of prostitution in early modern Japan transformed together with the rise of a market economy, leading us from major cities like Edo and Nagasaki, through mining towns and ports, to pilgrim sites in the Inland Sea. While the increasing commercialization of the Tokugawa economy was liberating for some, creating new opportunities for travel and leisure, Stanley shows that this new “freedom” was actually oppressive for many women. Initially understood as filial daughters embedded in families and communities that they worked to support, by the 19th century women who worked in the sex trade were increasingly seen as autonomous economic actors. As their bodies became commodities, prostitutes became symbols of the destructive influences of urban culture in the villages to which they increasingly came to work. Stanley’s book introduces these women and their world in a book that is rich with case studies that bring us into the lives of individual prostitutes, their families and employers, and the fascinating documents that allow us a glimpse into their stories.

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Reiland Rabaka, “Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement” (Lexington Books, 2011) Sep 11, 2012

Show notes

Cultural movements don’t exist in vacuums. Consciously or not, all movements borrow from, and sometimes reject, those that came before. In Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lexington Books, 2011), the first in a trilogy of books that cast a critical eye upon hip hop as a social and cultural movement, Reiland Rabaka traces the pre-history of hip hop as a series of separate yet connected movements that dealt with inequalities of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Using Africana, feminist, and queer critical theories as tools for understanding, Rabaka follows the history of black, women’s, and LGBT resistance to heterosexual white male hegemony in U.S. culture. Rabaka’s focus is always on the roles that art and artists (literary, visual, musical) have in people’s active resistances to oppression. The Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, Black Women’s Liberation, and Feminist Art Movements are just a few of the cultural happenings that Rabaka details as precursors to today’s “conscious” rap, feminist rap, and Homo-Hop, among others. All along, Rabaka’s message is not simply academic, he is also speaking directly to contemporary hip hoppers, urging them not to forget their past and to learn from the struggles of their forbears.

Reiland Rabaka is an Associate Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an Affiliate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He has published ten books, including Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (2012) and The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation (2013).

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Janet Kourany, “Philosophy of Science After Feminism” (Oxford UP, 2010) Sep 10, 2012

Show notes

Do social values belong in the sciences?

Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more socially and politically engaged philosophy of science. Janet Kourany‘s book is a service to scholars and interested readers across the many fields of science studies, providing the reader with a set of models as well as offering a capsule history of the philosophy of science as a professional discipline. The book is a profoundly transdisciplinary work even as it maintains a very careful focus on the philosophy of science as a discipline. Kourany’s archive includes the work of philosophers of science, feminist theorists, sociologists, historians, and many others, with the reader consistently and sometimes explicitly invited into the dialogue. Kourany suggests a program that emerges from previous and contemporary attempts to create a more socially-engaged philosophy of science, guides us through some major potential challenges to the political approach that she advocates, and provides concrete suggestions for integrating philosophers into the construction of more thoughtful ethical codes for scientific practice. It is an engaging, thoughtful, and teachable text advocating a space of philosophers as public intellectuals, and we had a very enjoyable and spirited conversation about it. Enjoy!

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Marnie Anderson, “A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) Aug 24, 2012

Show notes

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, they transformed Japan: what was a thoroughly traditional, quasi-feudal welter of agricultural estates became a modern industrial nation-state. Since the inspiration for these reforms came from the West (the Japanese had seen what the Western Powers had done in China), the question of women’s status had to be dealt with. How did the Japanese–men and women, elite and commoner–do it? In A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), Marnie Anderson attempts to answer this question. It’s a fascinating story, and Marnie does a terrific job of telling it (despite, I should say, of working in a remarkably thin and difficult documentary environment). This book is essential reading for anyone interested in East Asian and Gender Studies.

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Lisa Bier, “Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870-1926” (McFarland, 2011) Aug 10, 2012

Show notes

American women dominated the swimming competition at the London Olympics, earning a total of sixteen medals in seventeen events. This template of success was set already at the 1920 Games, the first Olympics in which American women swimmers competed. Women’s swimming races had been introduced in 1912 at Stockholm, but U.S. women had been barred from attending by their own country’s athletics officials. When they were finally able to compete in Antwerp, the American women, led by 18-year-old Ethelda Bleibtrey, swept all of the medals in the two individual events and won gold in the one relay race. In successive games from the Thirties through the Fifties, swimmers from the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, and Australia bested American women. And of course, the infamous East German women reigned at Montreal, Moscow, and Seoul. But throughout the history of the Olympics, American women swimmers have consistently shown themselves to be among the best in the world.

According to Lisa Bier, female swimmers must also be considered the ultimate trailblazers in early women’s sports in the United States. The barriers they faced were not simply the male leaders of American amateur athletics, or the men and women who felt that participation in any sport was contrary to female nature. They also had to deal with gawkers eager to see a bit of skin, and police who forced them to cover up (the aforementioned Bleibtrey was arrested for “nude swimming” when she appeared on a beach without her stockings). And above all, both female and male swimmers of the 19thand early 20thcenturies had to ply through bays and rivers that also served as city dumps. Lisa’s book Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870-1926 (McFarland, 2011) details these obstacles and presents the women who battled them: swim teachers who promoted water safety, racers who moonlighted as Vaudeville performers, and lifeguards who became Olympians. If you’re looking for a book for that last day on the beach, this one offers a colorful view of what it was like, a century ago, to take a trip to the shore, put on a swimsuit, and jump in the water.

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Sara Marcus, “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution” (Harper Perennial, 2010) Jul 03, 2012

Show notes

Harkening out of the United State’s Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile made a big enough splash that their names and songs are still recognized by many rock fans. And those of us who do recognize these bands tend to link them to a larger artistic and musical genre known as Riot Grrrl. In Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Harper Perennial, 2010), Sara Marcus traces the first five explosive years of Riot Grrrl, 1989-1994. She convincingly shows that although some very cool music was at its core, the movement went far beyond the bands, and far beyond Olympia, WA. Marcus follows the members of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile as they travel to Washington, D.C. forming girls-only collectives, participating in nationally organized political demonstrations, writing stridently feminist fanzines, and playing gigs to audiences of outcast girls who found there was indeed a supportive place for them to express themselves freely. By ’93 the movement was international with Riot Grrrl chapters in Minneapolis, Oklahoma, New York City, Vancouver, B.C., and London to name just a few. Toward the end of the book’s timeframe, Riot Grrrl was weakened by forces that befall many social movements: the mainstream press and music industry co-opted some of its important leaders and images, infighting among members kept some chapters from realizing their goals, and strident localism kept geographically disparate branches from forming lasting network ties. All-in-all, however, Marcus convincingly shows Riot Grrrl to have been an important wave of an ongoing feminist movement in which young women and girls redefined sex, gender, and sexuality as their own.

Sara Marcus writes about music, books, and politics for numerous publications, including Bookforum, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum.com, Slate, Salon, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Out New York, The Forward, and Heeb magazine, where she was politics editor for five years; her poetry has appeared in Death, Encyclopedia, EOAGH, Tantalum, and The Art of Touring. She has taught at girls’ rock camps in Portland and New York, has played drums and keyboards in a long string of relatively short-lived bands, and continues to instigate communal, de-skilled music making whenever possible.

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Nwando Achebe, “The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe” (Indiana University Press, 2011) Jun 29, 2012

Show notes

When I saw Nwando Achebe‘s book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011), I thought: “Really? A female king? Cool!” It turns out Ahebi Ugbabe was not only a female king, but also a female husband and father. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Ahebi Ugbaba was born late in the nineteenth century in Igboland, in present-day Nigeria. She fled home to escape her community’s dedication of her in marriage to a deity to compensate for a crime her father had committed. The marriage would have reduced her to the status of a slave. After twenty years as a prostitute and trader in exile, she returned and established herself: first as headman, then as warrant chief, and finally as king. For a biological woman to transform herself into a social man was a familiar practice in Igboland. But for anyone to be chief or king was not. The Igbo had practiced communitarian rule by groups of elders; it was the British who imposed rule by a single person. It was perhaps inevitable that Ahebi’s rule would be troubled. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugabe is a fascinating exploration of the fluidity of gender and the nature of political authority. And it’s a remarkable reconstruction not only of colonial rule at the local level, but also of pre-colonial life and post-colonial memory. I highly recommend

Nwando Achebe, Professor of History at Michigan State University, is the winner of both the Barbara “Penny” Kanner Prize and the Gita Chaudhuri Prize of the Western Association of Women Historians.

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Timothy Grainey, “Beyond ‘Bend It Like Beckham’: The Global Phenomenon of Women’s Soccer” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) Jun 22, 2012

Show notes

Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match of the Women’s Champions League. In a pairing of the defending champion, Olympique Lyon, and the club that has won the most titles in the tournament’s 11-year history, FFC Frankfurt, the French side took the cup with a 2-0 victory. The game drew just over 50,000 spectators, by far the most people ever to attend a Women’s Champions League final. UEFA officials and organizers in Munich had worked deliberately to ensure a record-breaking turnout. Match time was moved to the early evening, and special family-priced tickets were available to ensure that mothers could attend with their children. Men’s clubs in the Bundesliga have adopted similar family pricing along with other measures aimed at bringing women to the grounds. As a result, matches in the German first division draw a higher percentage of female spectators than any other European league. Add to that the large number of girls and women who play football in Germany, along with the seven European championships and three Olympic bronze medals, and the country presents an impressive picture of female involvement with the sport. This is striking, as it was only in 1970 that the German Football Association lifted its ban on women playing.

Women’s soccer in the United States has had a similarly remarkable rise in the last four decades. Women weren’t banned from the game. They simply didn’t play. But with the expansion of athletics for women and girls in the Title IX era, soccer has boomed.The U.S. has become the center of the women’s soccer world, with players coming from other countries to play for American university teams and American players going overseas to play, coach, and act as advocates for girls’ sports. Tim Grainey tells the story of these women, as well as players and coaches in other world regions, in his book Beyond Bend It Like Beckham: The Global Phenomenon of Women’s Soccer (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). As a longtime journalist and organizer, Tim draws upon decades of experience in the sport.The story he tells is encouraging, showing how the profile of women’s soccer has grown. However, girls and women still face resistance to their desire to play. FIFA President Sepp Blatter has said that the future of soccer is feminine. Tim’s book shows that the statement is not simply the empty phrase of a sportocrat. At the same time, though, its fulfillment is not assured.

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