New Books in Gender
1,978 episodes - English - Latest episode: 15 days ago - ★★★★ - 37 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Gender about their New Books
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Episodes
Sophie Bjork-James, "The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesThe Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explai...
Charlotte Karem Albrecht, "Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling" (U California Press, 2023)
August 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMany of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (U California Press, 2023), Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and ea...
Postscript: Protecting the Public? Guns, Intimate Partner Violence, and the US Supreme Court
August 07, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesPostscript invites scholars to react to contemporary political events and today’s podcast welcomes an expert on domestic violence and firearms law to analyze a controversial Second Amendment case that the United States Supreme Court will hear this Fall, United States v. Rahimi. Kelly Roskam, JD is the Director of Law and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. She studies the constitutional implications of, advocates for, and works to improve the implementat...
Sharon Thompson, "Quiet Revolutionaries: The Married Women's Association and Family Law" (Hart Publishing, 2022)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesThis book tells the untold story of the Married Women's Association. Unlike more conventional histories of family law, which focus on legal actors, it highlights the little-known yet indispensable work of a dedicated group of life-long activists. Formed in 1938, the Married Women's Association took reform of family property law as its chief focus. The name is deceptively innocuous, suggesting tea parties and charity fundraisers, but in fact the MWA was often involved in dramatic confrontation...
Falguni A. Sheth, "Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesIn Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab (Oxford UP, 2022), Falguni Sheth explores the multiple ways that liberalism is understood and exploited, and liberalism’s origin as a project of British colonialism and as a legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. The “unruly women” in the author’s title are, in liberalism, women who do not conform or who are not “suitably feminist”—like Muslim women who veil or Black women who, really, simply exist. Falguni argues that certain key terms,...
Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon, "Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film" (U California Press, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesThis field-defining collection establishes unfinished film projects--abandoned, interrupted, lost, or open-ended--as rich and under-appreciated resources for feminist film and media studies. In deeply researched and creatively conceived chapters, scholars join with film practitioners in approaching the unfinished film as an ideal site for revealing the lived experiences, practical conditions, and institutional realities of women's film production across historical periods and national borders...
Courtney Adams Wooten, "Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Women's Reproductive Choices" (Utah State UP, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesChildfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Womens' Reproductive Choices (Utah State University Press, 2023) examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and h...
Matthew Bentley and John D. Bloom, "The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) examines the competing versions of manhood at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918. Students often arrived at Carlisle already engrained with Indigenous ideals of masculinity. On many occasions these ideals would come into conflict with the models of manhood created by the school’s original superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt be...
Petra Bueskens, "Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract" (Routledge, 2018)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhy do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (Routledge, 2018), Pet...
Rahil Roodsaz, "Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesSexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belongin...
Melissa Shew and Kimberly Garchar, "Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMelissa Shew and Kimberly Garchar's book Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought (Oxford UP, 2020) empowers its readers by exploring enduring, challenging, and timely philosophical issues in new essays written by expert women philosophers. The book will inspire and entice these philosophers' younger counterparts, curious readers of all genders, and all who support equity in philosophy. If asked to envision a philosopher, people might imagine a bearded man, probably Greek, p...
Nicole Evelina, "America's Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor" (Two Dot Books, 2023)
July 25, 2023 04:00 - 45 minutesAfter being forgotten for nearly 130 years, the “Mother of Suffrage in Missouri” and her husband are finally taking their rightful place in history. St. Louisans Virginia and Francis Minor forever changed the direction of women’s rights by taking the issue to the Supreme Court for the first and only time in 1875, a feat never eclipsed even by their better-known peers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet despite a myriad of accomplishments and gaining notoriety in their own time, t...
Kathleen Lubey, "What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourKathleen Lubey,'s book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining s...
Postscript: Is it Unconstitutional to Take Guns Away from Domestic Abusers?
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesThe Supreme Court recently wrapped up their term – and announced that they will hear a very controversial case about domestic abuse, the power of Congress, and the right to keep and bear arms called United States v. Rahimi. The Court will decide whether a Texas man who assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone has been deprived of his Second Amendment rights. When the assaulted woman later obtained a restraining order against Mr. Zackey Rahimi, f...
Robert Payne, "Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature" (Peter Lang, 2021)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesRobert Payne's Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature (Peter Lang, 2021) is the first book-length study of representations of lesbian mothering in French literature. Focusing on female-authored texts published between 1970 and 2013, the book explores how literature reflects, engages with and even anticipates the recent, highly charged debates on the rights of same-sex couples and parents in France. Centered around the notion of «reimagining», the book exam...
Oyman Başaran, "Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey" (U Texas Press, 2023)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesIn Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey’s evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumc...
Miranda Corcoran, "Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches" (U Wales Press, 2022)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWitchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches (University of Wales Press, 2022) by Miranda Corcoran is a study in teenage witches in twentieth-century American popular culture. The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, television, and comics about witchy women register shifting attitudes toward adolescent femininity...
African American Women on the American Railroad: A Conversation with Miriam Thaggert
July 17, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesMiriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (University of Illinois Press, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Riding Jane Crow features creative uses of a wide variety of sources to reconstruct how African American women interacted with Jim Crow railroads as both riders and workers. Thaggert and Vinsel also discuss what kinds of research were necessary to reconstruct the...
Michele Meek, "Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies" (Indiana UP, 2023)
July 17, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesTeen films of the 1980s were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of boys spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. While contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls' desires, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal in teen films. In Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies (Indiana UP, 2023), Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexu...
Brianna Holt, "In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America" (Plume Books, 2023)
July 16, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesPart memoir, part cultural critique, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America (Plume Books, 2023) uses pop culture and author Brianna Holt’s own lived experience to dissect the stereotypes and preconceived notions that young Black women must overcome in America today. In this fresh exploration of cultural appropriation, wokeness, tone policing, and more, Holt carefully dismantles myths about Black womanhood, allowing readers to assess their biases while exami...
Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesFrom the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (Cambridge UP, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt. Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how ...
Sara Moslener, "Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence" (Oxford UP, 2015)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesFirst taking hold of the American cultural imagination in the 1990s, the sexual purity movement of contemporary evangelicalism has since received considerable attention from a wide range of media outlets, religious leaders, and feminist critics. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford UP, 2015) offers a history of this movement that goes beyond the Religious Right, demonstrating a link between sexual purity rhetoric and fears of national decline that has shaped American ...
Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesJenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh, published by University of Washington Press in 2022. Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information and better prenatal and general healt...
Stephen Davies, "Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
July 10, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesElaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, Stephen Davies's Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (Bloomsbury, 2020) takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a captivating story of hair, skin, and make-up practices across times and cultures. From the decline of the hat, the function of jewelry and popularity of tattooin...
Jessica P. Cerdeña, "Pressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers" (U California Press, 2023)
July 10, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesPressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers (U California Press, 2023) centers the stories of mothers who migrated from Latin America, settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and overcame trauma and ongoing adversity to build futures for their children. These migrant mothers enact imperative resilience, engaging cognitive and social strategies to resist racial, economic, and gender-based oppression to seguir adelante, or press onward. Both a contemporary view of the impact...
Robert Mills, "Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
July 09, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesSeeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of s...
Dinah Hannaford, "Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care" (Stanford UP, 2023)
July 07, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesHiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Whether working for the United Nations, governmental aid agencies, or NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision, expatriate aid workers in the developing world employ maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners and chauffeurs. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes, these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed ...
Robin Steedman, "Creative Hustling: Women Making and Distributing Films from Nairobi" (MIT Press, 2023)
July 06, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesWhat is the future of the global creative economy? In Creative Hustling: Women Making and Distributing Films from Nairobi (MIT Press, 2023), Robin Steedman, a postdoc in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School, offers a detailed analysis of the struggles and successes of women in Kenya’s capital city. The book draws on detailed fieldwork in Nairobi and an in-depth knowledge of the international film industry to explain how gender, class, and racia...
Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson, "Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture" (Texas A&M Press, 2013)
July 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourKristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson have each worked on and researched questions of gender, leadership, executive positions, and popular culture. In Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture, Horn Sheeler and Vasby Anderson examine the experiences of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin as both women ran for office in 2008, at the presidential and vice-presidential level respectively. Woman President digs into the question of gendered presidentiality, and how t...
Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn C. Higgins, "Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt" (Polity Press, 2023)
July 05, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesWho is believed in our mediated world? In Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communica...
Tilly Bridges, "Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix" (BearManor Media, 2023)
July 04, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesIn Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix (BearManor Media, 2023), trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person's transition journey - from Thomas Anderson, to Neo... to Trinity. Each movie's allegory is deeply layered, building from movie to movie, and speaks to a different ...
Peggy O'Donnell Heffington, "Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother" (Seal Press, 2023)
July 02, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesIn an era of falling births, it’s often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others—the vast majority, then and now—who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone. In Wi...
Rose Hackman, "Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power" (Flatiron Books, 2023)
June 29, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesIn some ways, Hackman’s Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power (Flatiron Books, 2023) serves as a natural update to Arlie Hochschild’s classic, The Managed Heart. After all, in public life it’s most often the women members of the service economy—in retail, in nursing, teaching, and elsewhere—who are asked to exercise emotional skills that often go undervalued and, therefore, also under-compensated. Hackman goes further, however, by also exploring the ...
Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, "Gender Without Identity" (Unconscious in Translation, 2023)
June 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, JJ Mull discusses Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) with co-authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Weaving together a variety of influences -- ranging from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to trans of color critique and queer theory -- Gender Without Identity formulates a theory of gender formation adequate to the radical complexity of trans and queer subjects. Pushing up against static notions of “core gender identity,” Saketopoulou and Pe...
Lynsey Black, "Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64" (Manchester UP, 2022)
June 27, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesDr Lynsey Black is a lecturer in criminology, in the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University. She researches in the areas of gender and punishment, the death penalty, historical and postcolonial criminology, and borders. In this interview she discusses her new book, Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64 (Manchester UP, 2022). Gender and Punishment in Ireland explores women's lethal violence in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive archival resea...
The Singer Sewing Machine in Spain and Mexico: Multinational Business, Gender, and Technologies
June 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHistorian Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez talks about her book, Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-1940 (Routledge, 2021), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Gendered Capitalism tells the fascinating tale of how the Singer corporation operated in Spain and Mexico. Along the way, Cruz-Fernandez finds that selling sewing machines was not a top-down process by which an American corporation forced its products on unwilling consumers, but a co...
Thomas Arentzen, et al., "Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality" (Fordham UP, 2022)
June 24, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesSex is a difficult issue for contemporary Christians, but the past decade has witnessed a newfound openness regarding the topic among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Both the theological trajectory and the historical circumstances of the Orthodox Church differ radically from those of other Christian denominations that have already developed robust and creative reflections on sexuality and sexual diversity. Within its unique history, theology, and tradition, Orthodox Christianity holds rich resou...
Yvette Taylor, "Working-Class Queers: Time, Place, and Politics" (Pluto Press, 2022)
June 24, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesWhat is the relationship between class and sexuality? In Working-Class Queers: Time, Place and Politics (Pluto Press, 2023), Yvette Taylor, Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde, explores the lives of working-class queers to tell the story of the past twenty years in the UK and beyond. Reflecting on her own biography as a researcher, the book brings in analysis of a range of research projects, giving insights into the impact of Brexit, austerity, and the pandemic on working-...
Amy Tooth Murphy et al., "New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption" (Routledge, 2022)
June 23, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesNew Directions in Queer Oral History, edited by Amy Tooth Murphy, Clare Summerskill, and Emma Vickers (Routledge, 2022) is a comprehensive international collection that reflects on the practice, purpose, and functionality of queer oral history, and in doing so demonstrates the vibrancy and innovation of this rapidly evolving field. Drawing on the roots of oral history’s original commitment to "history from below" queer oral history has become an indispensable methodology at the heart of queer...
Ngaire Naffine, "Criminal Law and the Man Problem" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
June 23, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesMen have always dominated the most basic precepts of the criminal legal world – its norms, its priorities and its character. Men have been the regulators and the regulated: the main subjects and objects of criminal law and by far the more dangerous sex. And yet men, as men, are still hardly talked about as the determining force within criminal law or in its exegesis. Criminal Law and the Man Problem (Bloomsbury, 2020) by Dr. Ngaire Naffine brings men into sharp focus, as the pervasively power...
Lisabeth During, "The Chastity Plot" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
June 21, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesIn The Chastity Plot (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western cu...
Yue Du, "State and Family in China" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Imperial China, the idea of filial piety not only shaped family relations but was also the official ideology by which Qing China was governed. In State and Family in China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Yue Du examines the relationship between politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949, focusing on changes in family law, parent-child relationships, and the changing nature of the Chinese state during this period. This book highlights how the Qing dynasty t...
Orit Avishai, "Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel" (NYU Press, 2023)
June 18, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesUntil fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement. Drawing on more th...
Anna Piela, "Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
June 16, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesIn recent years the niqab has emerged as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of everything that is perceived to be wrong with Islam: barbarity, backwardness, exploitation of women, and political radicalization. Yet all these notions are assigned to women who wear the niqab without their consultation; “niqab debates” are held without their voices being heard, and, when they do speak, their views are dismissed. Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US (Bloomsbury, 2021) brings niqab ...
Grace Elisabeth Lavery, "Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques" (Princeton UP, 2023)
June 15, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesIn Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton UP, 2023), Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one's sex. This ambivalence, she argue...
Alison S. Fell, "Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, c.1850-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
June 14, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesAlison S. Fell's book Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, c.1850-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines women warriors as vehicles of mobilisation. It argues that women warrior figures from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War are best understood as examples of 'palimpsestic memory', as the way they were represented reflected new contexts while retaining traces of legendary models such as Joan of Arc, and of 'travelling memory', as their stories crosse...
Nate G. Hilger, "The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" (MIT Press, 2023)
June 13, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesFew people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers--parents--labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It's almost as if parents are set up to fail--and the result is lost opp...
Payal Arora et al., "Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
June 12, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesThe future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride-hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the fu...
Jacqueline Beatty, "In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America" (NYU Press, 2023)
June 11, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesPatriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demandin...
Athene Donald, "Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesWhy are girls discouraged from doing science? Why do so many promising women leave science in early and mid-career? Why do women not prosper in the scientific workforce? Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science (Oxford UP, 2023) looks back at how society has historically excluded women from the scientific sphere and discourse, what progress has been made, and how more is still needed. Athene Donald, herself a distinguished physicist, explores societal expectations during both ...