New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Catherine Grant, "A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art" (Duke UP, 2022) Apr 22, 2023

Show notes

In A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art(Duke UP, 2022) Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and ideas across generations, Grant demonstrates that for many contemporary feminist artists, the present moment can only be understood through an embodied engagement with history in which feminist pasts are reinhabited and reimagined.

Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

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Kerri Lynn Stone, "Panes of the Glass Ceiling: The Unspoken Beliefs Behind the Law's Failure to Help Women Achieve Professional Parity" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Apr 21, 2023

Show notes

More than fifty years of civil rights legislation and movements have not ended employment discrimination. Kerri Lynn Stone's Panes of the Glass Ceiling: The Unspoken Beliefs Behind the Law's Failure to Help Women Achieve Professional Parity (Cambridge UP, 2022) reframes the discourse about the "glass ceiling" that women face with respect to workplace inequality. It explores the unspoken, societally held beliefs that underlie and engender workplace behaviour and failures of the law, policy, and human nature that contribute "panes" and ("pains") to the "glass ceiling." Each chapter identifies an "unspoken belief" and connects it with failures of law, policy, and human nature. It then describes the resulting harm and shows how this belief is not imagined or operating in a vacuum, but is pervasive throughout popular culture and society. By giving voice to previously unvoiced - even taboo - beliefs, we can better address and confront them and the problems they cause.

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Kaitlin Sidorsky and Wendy J. Schiller, "Inequality across State Lines: How Policymakers Have Failed Domestic Violence Victims in the United States" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Apr 16, 2023

Show notes

In the United States, one in four women will be victims of domestic violence each year. Despite the passage of federal legislation on violence against women beginning in 1994, differences persist across states in how domestic violence is addressed. Kaitlin Sidorsky and Wendy J. Schiller's bookInequality across State Lines: How Policymakers Have Failed Domestic Violence Victims in the United States (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates the epidemic of domestic violence in the U.S. through the lens of politics, policy adoption, and policy implementation. Combining narrative case studies, surveys, and data analysis, the book discusses the specific factors that explain why U.S. domestic violence politics and policies have failed to keep women safe at all income levels, and across racial and ethnic lines. The book argues that the issue of domestic violence, and how government responds to it, raises fundamental questions of justice; gender and racial equality; and the limited efficacy of a state-by-state and even town-by-town response. This book goes beyond revealing the vast differences in how states respond to domestic violence, by offering pathways to reform.

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Mina Roces, "Gender in Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Apr 15, 2023

Show notes

Gender in Southeast Asia(Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how gender norms are constructed and contested in a region the book describes as ‘a fertile place for analysing gender differences that both defy and modify dominant paradigms that emanate from the Western world’ (p.1).

In less than 100 pages, Professor Mina Roces provides a clear and compelling summary of pioneering work on gender studies in the region, identifies the contradictory discourses of gender ideals that shape historical and contemporary power relations and puts a spotlight on how religion and authoritarian governments advanced and policed gender constructs. The book concludes by mapping the various ways in which citizens and transnational movements resist, contest, and transform dominant cultural constructions.

Mina Roces is a Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Languages in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her research interests lie in twentieth century Philippine history particularly women’s history as well as the history of dress. She is book series editor for the Sussex Library of Asian and Asian American Studies Book Series and leader of the UNSW Research Cluster on Imperial, Colonial and Transnational Histories. In 2016 she was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel.

This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Ariane Defreine of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney.

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Gregory J. Kaliss, "Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Apr 14, 2023

Show notes

Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown's endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn more money and enjoy greater freedom. Gregory J. Kaliss examines these events and others to guide readers through the unprecedented wave of protest that swept sports in the 1960s and 1970s. The little-known story of the University of Wyoming football players suspended for their activism highlights an analysis of protests by college athletes. The 1971 Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier clash provides a high-profile example of the Black male athlete's effort to redefine Black masculinity. An in-depth look at the American Basketball Association reveals a league that put Black culture front and center with its style of play and shows how the ABA influenced the development of hip-hop. In Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Kaliss describes the breakthroughs achieved by these athletes, while also exploring the barriers that remained--and in some cases remain today.

Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu.

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Abortion and the Law Apr 12, 2023

Show notes

Today’s Postscript focuses on abortion politics in the United States, with particular attention to the April 7, 2023 federal court decisions in Texas and Washington controlling access to mifepristone and the wider political forces at play. We have a slightly different format for today’s emergency podcast – spanning four time zones. First, legal historian Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Professor of Law at UC Davis, shares insights on the two cases – and why the Texas opinion is such a radical departure with regards to standing and legal language. Then Political Scientist Rebecca Kreitzer, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides a deep dive on the role of the Comstock Act of 1873 and why this 19th century law helps us understand 21st century reproductive politics. The podcast concludes with two scholars of politics and law Dr. Renée Ann Cramer, Professor of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver). They pull back the curtain on the cases to expose the ways in which those who oppose abortion have created parallel organizations to provide the false expertise relied upon in the Texas decision. We also talk about the wider implications of banning approved medications for trans people.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

Mary Ziegler, The Texas Abortion-Pill Ruling Signals Pro-Lifers’ Next Push
New York Times graphic of the 100+ scholarly articles proving mifepristone safe
The opposing court opinions from the Texas and Washington courts
December 2022 Department of Justice Memo on Comstock, abortion, mifepristone, and misoprostol
Rep. Pat Schroeder’s 1996 speech calling for the part of Comstock regarding abortion to be overturned.

Rebecca J. Kreitzer and Candis Watts Smith, Washington Post, on Alito’s draft and research on women’s political power.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Hearts of Men: How Should Progressives React to Masculinity Influencers like Andrew Tate? Apr 12, 2023

Show notes

Online masculinity is getting weirder and weirder. We’re way past mere misogyny and sexual predation (though, that’s still certainly there). Now, we’ve also got bro science, ball tanning, ball eatin,’ piss drinkin,’ and who knows what's next.

However, perhaps these mockable male influencers are onto something, in a roundabout way. There is just something broken in the hearts of men, as Barbara Ehrenreich once put it. If there wasn't, male influencers wouldn't be as popular as they are. This new mansophere offers a simple for whatever ails: yearning for old gendered hierarchies, obsessing over self-improvement and dieting, and ceaselessly grinding under capitalism. In response, we ask: what's really wrong with men, and how might we fix it?

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Akiko Takeyama, "Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club" (Stanford UP, 2016) Apr 11, 2023

Show notes

Welcome to Tokyo's Kabuki-chō red-light district, where Professor Akiko Takeyama started her 'affective ethnographic' fieldwork to explore the host clubs in which ambitious young men seek their fortunes by selling love, romance, companionship, and female clients look for self-satisfaction. Her book Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club (Stanford UP, 2016) facilitates an intimate look at this mysterious love business, providing an insightful window into the lives of hosts, clients, club owners, and managers.

With rich details from her fieldwork, Takeyama reveals that the host club is a site of aspiration, desperation, and hope, where both hosts and clients are eager to take a chance. The hosts employ their exceptional sales skills to create a fantasy world for their clients who seek an escape from their everyday lives. In this world, 'the art of seduction' plays an important role to bring in the actors and actresses in a play staged at the club. The role of 'seducer' and 'seducee' are interchangeable in the host-client and manage-host relationship which are the core factors of the 'Affect Economy'.

Akiko Takeyama is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.

Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include diasporic Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies.

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Bettina Judd, "Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought" (Northwestern UP, 2022) Apr 08, 2023

Show notes

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work.

Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women’s creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women.

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women’s creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.

Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.

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Greta LaFleur et al., "Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern" (Cornell UP, 2021) Apr 05, 2023

Show notes

Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska's edited volume Transhistorical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives--literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts--that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal.

Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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