New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022) Apr 02, 2023

Show notes

Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise(Stanford UP, 2022).

Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they've lost in the shifting global economy around them. Ranging from multimillionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women, along with their translators and potential husbands from the US, Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China's global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does this reshape Chinese women's perception of Western masculinity? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals the shifting relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders.

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Gender and Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

What does climate change adaptation look like in Bangladesh? And what kind of gendered social landscape does climate change adaptation have to navigate in Bangladesh?

Bangladesh is among the countries most at risk from the negative consequences, and often spoken of as ground zero of climate change. In recent years, more attention has been devoted to grappling with the question of how gender intersects with climate change and adaptation.

In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Kathinka Fossum Evertsen to discuss these questions and more, as we focus on gender and climate change adaptation in Bangladesh.

Kathinka Fossum Evertsen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institue for Social Research. Her research interests include questions of migration, gender, and climate change, as well as the politics that shape how these issues are understood and how they intersect.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: https://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Laurah E. Klepinger, "Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots" (Lexington Books, 2022) Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots (Lexington Books, 2022) is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and about yoga practitioners and spiritual tourists who visualize peace through yoga. Practitioners' aspirations for peace situate them at the heart of an international movement that has captured the imagination of cosmopolitans the world over, with its purported benefits to mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is thought to offer health, vitality, and relief from depression through control of body and breath. Yet, the vision of peace in this institution is a partial vision that obscures the important but seemingly peripheral others of its self-conception.

Through in-depth ethnographic analysis, this book explores the processes through which global spiritual movements can have peace front and center in their vision and yet condone and perpetuate cycles of injustice and social inequality that form the critical and problematic foundations of our global economy. The book privileges the experiences and hardships faced by Indian wageworkers--most of them women --but it also offers a sympathetic portrayal of international yoga practitioners and of the complex patterns of work and worship central to a global mission.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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School Authority, Parents' Rights: Rita Koganzon on Early Modern Education Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

Americans have always had mixed emotions about schooling: in popular literature and television, teachers are often depicted as tyrannical authorities, even as in classroom settings they often try to style themselves as "friends." Dr. Rita Koganzon, professor of political science at the University of Houston, discusses the history of the idea of authority in education, dwelling on Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, and Bodin. Along the way, she covers contemporary issues like homeschooling and parents' rights, and how attitudes towards those concepts have changed from the Early Modern period to the present.

Koganzon is the author of Liberal States,Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford UP, 2021). Also see her recent article "There Is No Such Thing as a Banned Book: Censorship, Authority, and the School Book Controversies of the 1970s."

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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School Authority, Parents' Rights: Rita Koganzon on Early Modern Education Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd, "Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Mar 27, 2023

Show notes

Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd's book Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South (U Georgia Press, 2022) explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.

In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage—young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to “do” white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?

Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties’ racial work or their investment in it.

With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion—stylized and predictable but ephemeral—has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Uddipana Goswami, "Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency" (Routledge, 2022) Mar 26, 2023

Show notes

Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency(Routledge, 2022) forward Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally.

In the shifting and relational margins of such peripheral societies, power and agency are constantly negotiated and in flux. Notions of masculinity are redefined in an interlaced environment of militarization, hyper-masculinization, and gendered violence. These interconnections inform victimhood and agency among the most vulnerable marginalised constituencies – namely, women and migrants. By centering the marginalised in its inquiry, the book analyses obstacles to achieving positive, organic peace based on cooperation and mutual healing. The tools used to perpetuate an endless cycle of violence that makes conflict a habit – a way of life – are identified in order to enable resistance against them from within the margins. Such resistance must be based on reflexivity and strategic, cautious radicalism. This involves critically interrogating the inherent connections between engendered pasts and feminist futures, local changes and global contexts, as well as between small, incremental changes and big shifts impacting entire societies, nations, and global orders.

This book will be of much interest to students of ethnic conflict, conflict resolution, feminist peace, and Asian/South Asian politics.

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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Robin M. Morris, "Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" (U Georgia Press, 2022) Mar 23, 2023

Show notes

Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right(U Georgia Press, 2022) is a statewide study of women’s part in the history of conservatism, the New Right, and the Republican Party in the state of Georgia. Robin M. Morris examines how the growth of the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s was due in large part to the political activism of white women. The book begins with the African American women who established the Georgia Federation of Republican Women and follows how they lost the organization and the party to white women moving to the Sunbelt South. Conservative white women developed a language and strategy of family values that they deployed to battle school busing, defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and elect Republican leaders even in Jimmy Carter’s home state.

Morris uses original interviews and archival research in personal papers of women activists in the Georgia New Right movement, including Lee Ague Miller, Beth Callaway, Kathryn Dunaway, Lee Wysong, and Hattie Greene, to reveal the motivations and actions that transformed the state from blue to red. In this era, perceived threats to family life and traditional values spurred women-led grassroots organization that enabled broad political shifts on the state level. Conservative women carved out their political niche as they consolidated and expanded their power and influence. Rather than a male-dominated, top-down approach, Morris centers her historical account on the middle-class white women whose actions changed the political landscape of the state and ultimately the country.

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

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Julia Kowalski, "Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) Mar 22, 2023

Show notes

Women’s rights activists around the world have commonly understood gendered violence as the product of so-called traditional family structures, from which women must be liberated. Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) contends that this perspective overlooks the social and cultural contexts in which women understand and navigate their relationships with kin.

This book follows frontline workers in India, called family counselors, as they support women who have experienced violence at home in the context of complex shifting legal and familial systems. Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Julia Kowalski shows how an individualistic notion of women’s rights places already vulnerable women into even more precarious positions by ignoring the reality of the social relations that shape lives within and beyond the family. Thus, rather than focusing on attaining independence from kin, family counselors in India instead strive to help women cultivate relationships of interdependence in order to reimagine family life in the wake of violence. Counselors mobilize the beliefs, concepts, and frameworks of kinship to offer women interactive strategies to gain agency within the family, including multigenerational kin networks encompassing parents, in-laws, and other extended family. Through this work, kinship becomes a resource through which people imagine and act on new familial futures.

In viewing this reliance on kinship as part of, rather than a deviation from, global women’s rights projects, Counseling Women reassesses Western liberal feminism’s notions of what it means to have agency and what constitutes violence, and retheorizes the role of interdependence in gendered violence and inequality as not only a site of vulnerability but a potential source of strength.

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Leigh Goodmark, "Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 22, 2023

Show notes

Leigh Goodmark’s new book, Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (U California Press, 2023), uses the stories of individual criminalized survivors of gender based violence to illuminate the ways that the criminal legal system perpetuates violence against the very women, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people it claims to protect. Leigh argues that reform is not the answer to this problem, and that instead of limiting our efforts and imaginations to the pursuit of reforms that ultimately expand the reach of the criminal legal system, we should invest in abolition feminism and a world of non-carceral supports and resources like housing, healthcare, and education instead of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.

Kendall Dinniene is a fourth year English PhD student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work.

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