New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette, "Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls" (Lexington Books, 2022) Aug 27, 2023

Show notes

Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls(Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereotypes; roles garnered by Halle Berry, the only Black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role; the promise of characters, relationships, and scripts found in works ranging from Altered Carbon, Lovecraft Country, and HBO’s Watchmen series; and a closing chapter that considers the legacy of Black women in horror. Jeffrey-Legette illustrates the ways in which recent texts explore the trauma endured by people of African descent in the United States of America in evocative ways. In doing so, she provides a compelling interpretation of prevalent, well-received, and recurring images of Black women and girls in American popular culture.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Chris Dietz, "Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender" (Routledge, 2022) Aug 26, 2023

Show notes

Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender(Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with regard to legal gender. Based on empirical research conducted in Denmark, the book engages in some of the most controversial issues surrounding trans and gender diverse rights. The theoretical analysis draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability and governmentality, to cross jurisdictional boundaries between law and medicine. The book reflects on the limits of progress that legislative reform may make, and the way that increased regulation can actually limit access to rights protections. Broadly transferrable beyond its specific field, this book will be useful to socio-legal scholars, feminist scholars, trans scholars, policy makers and practitioners.

Dr Chris Dietz is a Lecturer at the Centre for Law & Social Justice at The University of Leeds.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Chesya Burke, "Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero" (Rutgers UP, 2023) Aug 25, 2023

Show notes

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure.

Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero (Rutgers UP, 2023) offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially “exotic,” an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman.

With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Managing your Mental Health During Your PhD Aug 24, 2023

Show notes

Can your graduate school affect your mental health? Dr. Zoe Ayres joins us to discuss what she wishes she had known before starting graduate school, including:

What happens when you can’t access the hidden curriculum.
The myths we tell ourselves, and the systems that work against us.
How the pressures of graduate school can affect our mental health.
Why you need a to build a network of mentors outside your school.

Today’s book is: Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide, by Dr. Zoe Ayres, which investigates why mental health issues are so common among the student population. Ayres looks honestly at the experiences of PhD students, and explores environmental factors that can impact mental health. These include the PhD student-supervisor relationship, the pressure to publish, and deep systemic problems in academia, such as racism, bullying and harassment. She provides resources students, while offering ideas for improvements that universities can make to ensure that academia is a place for all to thrive.

Our guest is: Dr. Zoë Ayres, who studied for a PhD in chemistry at the University of Warwick, looking at using electrochemical boron doped diamond sensors to monitor environmental contaminants, before transitioning to industry. She worked for several years as a Senior Scientist in the water industry, before becoming Head of Research and Technology for a biotechnology start-up. She has transitioned back into academia, and is Head of Laboratory Facilities at the Open University, working with her team to manage over 180 laboratories. Zoë cares passionately about creating spaces for people to thrive in research. She is the author of Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide, and of articles and peer-reviewed papers on improving research culture. She is co-Founder of Voices of Academia, an international blog designed to share the academic mental health experiences of academics from around the world.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a historian.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from today’s experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life.

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PostScript: The Barbie Movie: A Conversation about a Cinematic and Cultural Event Aug 23, 2023

Show notes

Today’s episode of POSTSCRIPT explores and examines director Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie. This Warner Brothers’ movie has been in theaters for under a month but has crossed the $1 billion dollar mark during that time, breaking all kinds of box office records and making Gerwig the first solo female director to enter this rarified realm. Barbie is now Warner Brothers’ most successful film, surpassing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which had held that position at Warner Brothers. Barbie has hit a kind of cultural and cinematic sweet spot—with a marketing campaign around the movie establishing pink as the new black, bringing in Barbie-connected products across almost all consumer platforms, from Barbie-themed furniture to holiday home rentals, from lunchboxes and tee-shirts to new Mattel Barbies reflecting characters in the film. Barbie has also received positive reviews in the United States and globally, with audience members attending the film in pink clothing and accessories, often accompanied by friends and family members. Thus, Barbie is more than a summer tent-pole release, though it certainly has fulfilled that particular role. Barbie is more of an event—driving theater attendance, conversations, and in-person community experiences.

In this episode, I am joined by four scholars and experts to discuss “all things Barbie” as we examine the narrative of the film itself, the questions of gender and feminism, patriarchy, and sexuality. We also dive into the marketing campaign, the tensions between capitalism, neoliberalism, postfeminism, and an original intellectual property based on a consumer product. Dr. Linda Beail (Point Loma Nazarene University), Dr. Shuchi Kapila (Grinnell College), Dr. Danielle Hanley (Clark University), and Dr. Susan Liebell (St. Joseph University and co-host of the New Books in Political Science podcast) take up all these dimensions of this brightly colored film as we explore our thinking about this movie event that has landed in the post-Covid landscape of 2023.

We all found the experience of seeing Barbie, in a movie theater, to be one filled with joy and fun, for ourselves, and among those in the theater with us. Join in our conversation about Barbie, since this is both a delightful cinematic experience and a film with something to say to its audience and the world around us.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Corina Rodríguez Enríquez and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco, "Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Aug 23, 2023

Show notes

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have gained a renewed momentum in recent years, and have come to be viewed by governments and funders alike as a silver bullet for infrastructure development and public service provision. Critiques of the corporate capture of development are well established, yet until now the urgent question of the impacts of PPPs on women's human rights around the world has remained under-explored.

Corina Rodríguez Enríquez and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco's book Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2023) aims to fill the gap, providing new insights from a set of case studies from across the Global South. Bringing an intersectional feminist approach to PPPs, these cases enable analysis that can inform advocacy and activism, whilst challenging dominant narratives and resisting the negative impacts of PPPs on women and historically marginalized communities' human rights. Widely advocating for stronger regulatory frameworks and institutions, and indicating how changes could be implemented, the examples analysed cover a range of sectors including health, energy, and infrastructure from countries including Ethiopia, Peru, India and Fiji.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence here. Open access was funded by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN).

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Romit Chowdhury, "City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport" (Rutgers UP, 2023) Aug 22, 2023

Show notes

In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces?

Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, Romit Chowdhury's City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport (Rutgers UP, 2023) brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labour geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Brooke Kroeger, "Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism" (Knopf, 2023) Aug 21, 2023

Show notes

Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023)is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism's most valued work. From Margaret Fuller's improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women's rights. Here as well is the collective fight for equity from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today's racial and gender disparities.

Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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Kalani Adolpho et al., "Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries" (Library Juice Press, 2021) Aug 20, 2023

Show notes

In the library profession, and in the world as a whole, the experiences of trans and gender diverse people often go unnoticed, hidden, and ignored. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries(Library Juice Press, 2021) is entirely written and edited by trans and gender diverse people involved in the field: its fifty-seven authors include workers from academic and public libraries, special collections and archives, and more; LIS students; and a few people who have left the library profession completely.

Editors Kalani Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCracken share in this interview how this book is not intended to be the definitive guide to trans and gender diverse experiences in libraries, but instead to start the conversation. This project hopes to help trans and gender diverse people in libraries realize that they are not alone, and that their experiences are worth sharing.

This book also demonstrates some of the reality in a field that loves to think of itself as inclusive. From physical spaces to policies to interpersonal ignorance and bigotry, the experiences recounted in this book demonstrate that the library profession continues to fail its trans and gender diverse members over and over again. You cannot read these chapters and claim that Safe Zone stickers and “libraries are for everyone” signs have done the job. You cannot assume that everything is fine in your workplace because nobody has spoken out. You can no longer pretend that trans and gender diverse people don’t exist.

Find the table of contents for Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries as well as open access chapters online here. Learn about the Trans and Gender Diverse LIS network here.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Jamila Rodrigues, "Sufi Women, Embodiment and the 'Self': Gender in Islamic Ritual" (Routledge, 2023) Aug 18, 2023

Show notes

Jamila Rodrigues's new book Sufi Women, Embodiment and the “Self”: Gender in Islamic Ritual (Routledge 2023) uses her dance and performance studies background to study women’s hadra or zikr experiences of a Naqshbandi Sufi community in Cape Town, South Africa. This ritual includes engagement with sacred texts, music, and bodily movement with the aim of reaching union with Allah. This focused study on women’s bodily movement during zikr and women’s understanding of the mind and soul provides fascinating insights of what constitutes the “self” via ritual and performance studies. Rodrigues also uses auto-ethnography to situate some of this discussion on embodiment. The book will be of interest to anthropologists, Sufi studies scholars, and performance studies scholars.

Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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