New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, “Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History” (Oxford UP, 2012) Jun 08, 2012

Show notes

Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, turn their backs to her. The girl is Abina, the men are “Important Men,” and together they grace the cover of of Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collaborative effort of historian Trevor R. Getz and graphic artist Liz Clarke.

In 1876 Abina took her former master to court in the British-controlled Gold Coast for having enslaved her. She had already escaped to freedom: she seems to have brought charges simply because she wanted her experience of slavery to be recognized. It wasn’t. Abina lost her case. But in reconstructing Abina’s story in graphic form, Getz and Clarke bring it to present-day readers. And they also bring important questions to the students who are the intended audience of this book: What background information do we need to understand Abina’s story? Whose voices do we hear, and whose don’t we hear? What do historians do when they don’t know all the details of a story?

Trevor R. Getz is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, and Liz Clarke is a professional artist and graphic designer based in Cape Town, South Africa. Together, they bring a silenced voice back to life, and they do it in an enormously engaging way.

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

Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011) May 23, 2012

Show notes

When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how many children you can have – and they’re horrified.

One thing I learned from reading Gail Hershatter‘s new book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011), was that rural women of a generation earlier would have loved to have the state take charge of their fertility. The state was already controlling so much – like how many bushels of grain they had to produce even as they tended to their very large families – why couldn’t it do something about how many children they had? Once their children were grown, those same women became proponents of the one-child policy, hoping to spare their daughters the grueling fates they’d endured. Their daughters, needless to say, didn’t fully appreciate their efforts.

That’s only one of the stories that emerges from this remarkable book. Based on seventy-two oral histories conducted with Hershatter’s collaborator, Gao Xiaoxian, The Gender of Memory explores rural women’s experience in the transition to Communism. We learn of their harrowing experiences during the preceding era of famine and civil war, and we learn of new opportunities women discovered as activists and model laborers. But we also learn of the crushing burdens of work and the persistence of poverty and hunger. Most of all, we hear voices that are rarely heard. If you want to be reminded of how moving history can be, then read this book.

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

Patricia Gherovici, “Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism” (Routledge, 2010) May 21, 2012

Show notes

In Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Patricia Gherovici unpacks the ways in which hysteria, Lacanian-style, functions. Approaching her topic, transgenderism, from many angles, she takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the transgender turn is changing clinical thinking and practice. The person who comes into the consulting room with questions about “being in the right body” sheds light on the culture and perhaps especially the culture of psychoanalysis. Arguing against a more traditional Lacanian view that the refusal to accept sexual difference is indicative of a psychotic structure, Gherovici details why she thinks otherwise. She is passionate and informed and true to her training all at once. NBiP senses that she is an unusual psychoanalytic scholar who is exhaustive in her cross-disciplinary research and so brings to us many challenging and provocative questions. Her thinking has strong foundations and her intellectual scaffolding is made of only the finest material. To analysts, anthropologists, activists, queer and feminist theorists, philosophers and historians, Patricia Gherovici has something to say.

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

Stephanie Coontz, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” (Basic Books, 2000) May 10, 2012

Show notes

“My mother was a saint.” ” In my time, we pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps.” “A man’s home is his castle.” “The home is the foundation of society.” These are just some of the romantic catchphrases that are commonly recited by those who claim that things just aren’t like they used to be in the “good old days.” In The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992/2000), Stephanie Coontz exposes these ideals for what they are: myths that portray an inaccurate perception of the past and hinder current discussions about the present and future. Crime, for instance, declined 20% between 1990 and 1998, and yet the number of murders covered by the media increased by 600%, leading many to believe that we live in a much more dangerous world than before. Other persistent but equally inaccurate myths include the belief that marriage is a dying institution, that black families are always in crisis, and that single parent-families produce dysfunctional children. Coontz also demonstrates that the 1950s, far from being the traditional norm for family relations in America, was actually a very unusual decade. In addition, she argues that what is believed to be natural and innate when it comes to gender roles is actually socially constructed, and that the notion of men as the breadwinners and women as homemakers is the result of a historical process.

The Way We Never Were is meticulously researched and offers a comprehensive view of the American family throughout the 1900s. It also effectively highlights the importance of not allowing feelings of nostalgia to skew our view of the past. The past, like everything else that is no more, can be easily idealized, but believing in a reality that never was can hamper the ability to deal with the reality that currently is.

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

Anna Krylova, “Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front” (Cambridge UP, 2010) Apr 27, 2012

Show notes

We’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All white, of course: African Americans would have to wait till the integration of the armed forces. But still, there’s a kind of earnest 1940s diversity in those movies: maybe a wide-eyed kid from the farm, a privileged college boy, and a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. With some subplot about a faithful girlfriend, or maybe an unfaithful one, back home.

In the Red Army, the situation was a little different. There, the women were snipers, tank drivers, combat pilots, machine gunners, and the like: skilled purveyors of lethal violence, serving side by side with men (and sometimes above them, as their commanding officers). This was the first Soviet generation, educated in co-educational schools where everyone participated in paramilitary exercises and no one took home economics. When the long-awaited war with Germany came, women of this cohort took for granted that they would take up arms.

Anna Krylova‘s book, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010), tells their story. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, letters, oral histories, and state records, Krylova reveals a world in which neither men nor women considered the “woman soldier” to be an oxymoron. And she reveals how this history was thoroughly marginalized after the war.

Anna Krylova is associate professor of history at Duke University, and her book is the 2011 winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the Second World War – and it’s a thoughtful lesson in the possibilities for reimagining gender.

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

Heather Munro Prescott, “The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States” (Rutgers UP, 2011) Apr 16, 2012

Show notes

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has allowed us to forget just how recently the issue of contraception was as fraught as the issue of abortion. And in any case, recent tussles over teen access to over-the-counter emergency contraception might have reminded us that debates about contraception are hardly closed.

In her new book The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States (Rutgers University Press, 2011), Heather Munro Prescott helps us to understand the politics of emergency contraception. Initially a side-product from research into infertility, hormonal contraceptives – both the “regular” and the “emergency” kind – became the subject of heated battles in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist health care advocates protested that the medical establishment was pushing potentially unsafe medications on women who were not fully informed of side-effects. With conservatives’ attack on reproductive rights starting in the 1980s, however, feminist health care advocates and the medical profession became allies in the battle for continued access. This alliance bore results in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the FDA reluctantly agreed to approve over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception (although not for minors).

Heather Munro Prescott is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. If you care about reproductive rights, you’ll want to take a look at her book.

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

Charlotte Witt, “The Metaphysics of Gender” (Oxford University Press, 2011) Apr 15, 2012

Show notes

Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), Charlotte Witt found that most people answered that obviously they’d be different if their gender differed – even though many feminist philosopher friends considered gender essentialism to be false. Thus a philosophical inquiry was born: what is gender essentialism, why might it be true, if it is true, and what consequences does this answer have for ourselves and societies?

In this engaging volume, Witt – who is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire – argues that a certain form of gender essentialism is true. Gender is the social role that unifies us as social individuals, an ontological category distinct from both human organisms and persons. By distinguishing social individuals from persons, Witt hopes to promote the idea that the point of feminism is not giving women more choices, but about reconfiguring social roles so that they no longer oppress and exploit women.

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

Mary Louise Adams, “Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport” (University of Toronto Press, 2011) Mar 08, 2012

Show notes

On the Minnesota rinks where I spent many days of my childhood, the skates made the man–or the boy, to be more accurate. Hockey skates had a boot of tough leather and a reinforced toe to protect against sticks and pucks, like work boots mounted on thick, sharp, rounded blades. In contrast, girls wore figure skates. The boots were made of softer leather, laced high up the ankle, with a tapered toe. And of course, the girls’ boots were white, whereas our hockey skates were black, preferably with plenty of scuffs. There were figure skates for boys and men, and these also had a black boot. But rare was the male who stepped on my neighborhood’s outdoor rink with figure skates. The few times it did happen, heads turned, fingers pointed, and the teasing was cruel. “Fairy nice skates” is what the boys said.

Although we didn’t realize it, our taunts expressed a deep-rooted stereotype in the United States and Canada: figure skating is an activity for girls, and men who skate are certainly effeminate, and most likely gay. Like most stereotypes associated with gender, this view of figure skating as inherently feminine was not always held. A century ago, figure skaters were almost all men, and their performances were regarded as exhibitions of controlled and graceful athleticism. Only since World War II has skating come to be viewed, in North America, as an activity for cute, pixieish girls and dandy men with a taste for sequins. Periodically, there have been attempts to draw more boys into the sport, with the spotlight placed on the athleticism of a Dick Button or the ruggedness of an Elvis Stojko. But the boys on the rinks of Minnesota or Ontario, and their parents, are hard to convince.

Sociologist Mary Louise Adams examines this gender history of figure skating in her book Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport (University of Toronto Press, 2011). As even she discovered in her research, the transformation of the sport is surprising. Our interview, and her book, reveal how influential a single athlete–in this case, Olympic champion Sonja Henie–can be for the popularity and the perceptions of a sport. And Mary Louise raises the troubling point that now, in an age of women’s boxing, rugby, and water polo, the gender limitations in sports might not be on what girls are able to do, but on what boys are allowed.

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

Scott Morgensen, “Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) Feb 14, 2012

Show notes

Here’s a study-guide prepared to accompany the interview.

For as much as recent decades have witnessed a patriarchal backlash against the growing visibility of LGBTQ people in North American society, there is another, increasingly popular narrative embodied by Dan Savage’s ubiquitous internet promise: “It gets better.” As barriers to equal treatment under the law are removed and the state incorporates gender and sexual diversity under its protective umbrella — marriage rights extended, prohibitions to military service lifted, etc — queer politics get folded into the progressive march of the West toward equity and tolerance.

But what about for queer people whose land is violently occupied by the very body politic going about all this incorporating? As Scott Lauria Morgensen powerfully articulates in his new book, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Indigenous Two-Spirit activists work for both decolonization and sexual freedom within their homelands, resisting state incorporation, cultural appropriation, and narratives of their “disappearance.”Brilliantly extending (and intervening) on the work of earlier theorists, Morgensen traces how modern sexual identities are built upon the replacement of indigenous sexuality and the development of settler colonialism in what is now the United States and Canada. “Native and queer studies must regard settler colonialism as a key condition of modern sexuality on stolen land,” Morgensen argues, “and use this analysis to explain the power of settler colonialism among Native and non-Native People.”

This is not simply an indictment. Morgensen shows how conversations between Natives and non-Natives can open up new frameworks for political activism and scholarly research, so long as they remain accountable to the ongoing colonization of Native lands. As mainstream LGBTQ organizations abandon their social movement pasts, Morgensen work is a clarion call for a new wave of decolonial queer organizing.

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

Judith Halberstam, “The Queer Art of Failure” (Duke UP, 2011) Feb 03, 2012

Show notes

Tell me, who can resist a book called The Queer Art of Failure? Not me. Especially once I learned that its heroines are the likes of Ginger (of *Chicken Run*) and Dory (of *Finding Nemo*). Children – the intended audience of 3D animated blockbusters – are revolting little creatures, it turns out, happy to wreak havoc on prescribed gender roles, distinctions between humans and animals (or toys, for that matter), and anything particularly orderly. In other words, they instinctively – and queerly – resist the markers of success in heteropatriarchal, capitalist society. OK, maybe they don’t use those terms. But you get the point.

Judith (“Jack”) Halberstam, Professor of English, Gender Studies, and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, presents forgetting, stupidity, lack of discipline, and losing as strategies of resistance against the constraints of success. Though even the term “strategies of resistance” suggests a heroic (if alternative) model of success that Halberstam, well, resists. Queers are, so to speak, champions of these kinds of failure. They can’t fulfill the model of heteronormativity – they lose! They deny the imperative to pass knowledge and memory through the generations – they forget!

But there’s also a darker side to all of this. Feminists, queers, and (post)-colonial subjects might discover that complete self-negation is the only way to fully opt out of heteropatriarchal and capitalist-defined success. And those who would claim alternative identities must grapple with their own complicity in oppression – a failure of failure, as it were. Consider the case of homosexual Nazis, as Halberstam daringly does.

Listen to the interview, read the book. And then you can join me in watching *Dude, Where’s My Car?*, a Halberstam-recommended Failure Film I seem to have missed.

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