New Books In Gender Studies

Freelance curator Joanne Rosenthal joins Jana Byars to talk about Sex: Jewish Positions (Hirmer, 2024) and its concomitant exhibition at the Jewish museums in Berlin and Amsterdam. This book is also available in German with the same publisher as Sex. Judisches Positionen. An exploration of sexuality in Judaism, from ultra-Orthodox to secular. Sensuous, bold, and topical, this volume studies the entire spectrum of Jewish attitudes to sexuality. In doing so it examines widely held and contradictory stereotypes, according to which Judaism encounters sexuality either in a highly positive manner or with exceptionally strict rules and restrictions. This significant volume takes up central aspects of sexuality in Judaism and provides a comprehensive insight on topics such as Rabbinic regulations and the history of sexuality in Judaism; how ultra-Orthodox women deal with the strict regulations relating to intimacy; sexuality in films and art; and the experience of a Jewish couple and sexual therapist. Accompanied by

Who deserves public assistance from the government? This age-old question has been revived by policymakers, pundits, and activists following the massive economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anne Whitesell takes up this timely debate, showing us how our welfare system, in its current state, fails the people it is designed to serve.  From debates over stimulus check eligibility to the uncertain future of unemployment benefits, Living Off the Government?: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare (NYU Press, 2024) tackles it all. Examining welfare rules across eight different states, as well as 19,000 state and local interest groups, Whitesell shows how we determine who is—and who isn't—deserving of government assistance. She explores racial and gender stereotypes surrounding welfare recipients, particularly Black women and mothers; how different groups take advantage of these harmful stereotypes to push their own political agendas; and how the interests and needs of welfare recipients are inadequately repr

The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organisations argue back and forth about whether circumcision is medically necessary, while “intactivists” advocate that removing an infant’s foreskin without their consent is mutilation. Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin (University of Regina Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Allen takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the foreskin and its contentious position in contemporary Anglo-American culture. From language to art, from religion to medicine and public health, Uncut is a provocative book that asks us to ask ourselves what we know and don’t know about this seemingly small piece of skin. Drawing on all these threads, Dr.. Allan leads us through the history and cultural

The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2024) is a provocative meditation on emotion, mood, history, and futurism in the critique of queer texts created for younger audiences. Given critical demands to distance queer youth culture from narratives of violence, sadness, and hurt that have haunted the queer imagination, this volume considers how post-2000s YA literature and media negotiate their hopeful purview with a broader—and ongoing—history of queer oppression and violence. It not only considers the tactics that authors use in bridging a supposedly “bad” queer past with a “better” queer present, but also offers strategies on how readers can approach YA reparatively given the field’s attachments to normative, capitalist, and neoliberal frameworks. Central to Matos’ argument are the use of historical hurt to spark healing and transformation, the implementation of disruptive imagery and narrative structures to challenge normative understandings of time and feeling, and the impact of

Alistaire Tallent joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France (University of Delaware Press, 2024). Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights. Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disrupt

Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh: Children of Crows (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive ethnographic accounts that depict the daily life experiences and health hardships encountered by young women and their families living in the slums of Dhaka city and the injustices they face.  The analysis focuses on two specific historical eras: 2002-2003 and 2020-2022 and shows that despite recent improvements in employment opportunities and greater mobility for young women, their lives reflect ongoing challenges reminiscent of those faced two decades earlier. While national and global organizations acknowledge the nation's economic and social progress, those on the outskirts of society continue to grapple with enduring poverty. They are excluded from the advantages of economic growth, oppressed by unjust local, national, and global systems, discriminatory laws, and policies. Their struggles go unnoticed as they confront a slew of challenges, including slum evictions, enforced lockdowns, income

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation (U Minnesota Press, 2024) offers new and insightful readings of African American women's writings in the 1930s-1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women's satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging. Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers' dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women's capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal. Wh

A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends. Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promoted woollen underwear to keep colds at bay. Beautification and the pursuit of health may seem all-consuming today, but their history is long and fantastically varied. Ranging across the last four hundred years, Margarette Lincoln examines women's health and beauty in fascinating detail. Through first-hand accounts and reports of physicians, quacks, and advertising, Lincoln captures women's lived experience of consuming beauty products, and the excitement--and trauma--of adopting the latest fashion trends. Considering everything from body sculpture, diet, and exercise to skin, teeth, and hair, Perfection: 400 Years of W

On Tuesday 13 September 2022, all Mahsa Amini has planned is a day shopping in Tehran. Her birthday is next week. But she is arrested as she comes out of the subway – the Guidance Patrol deem her hijab inadequate. On Friday she is pronounced dead. By Sunday, women have taken to the streets across Iran, setting their headscarves on fire and cursing the Supreme Leader. Months later, workers down their tools and businesses close. The battle cry everywhere: Women, Life, Freedom. This isn’t a passing protest wave; something has changed irrevocably.  Arash Azizi guides us through Iran ablaze, history being made in real time. From an International Women’s Day celebrated inside Iran’s most notorious prison to mass strikes in Kurdistan, ordinary Iranians are taking risks to fight for a better future. Even as the regime spills blood in retaliation, Iranians have not given up. Today one thing’s clear: no Supreme Leader can turn the clock back. A different Iran is within sight; Azizi shows us what it might look like in W

In Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee expands the theoretical horizons of feminism by using characteristic Confucian terms, methods, and concerns to interrogate the issue of gender oppression and liberation. With its theoretical roots in the Confucian textual tradition, this is the first re-imagining of Confucianism that enriches, and is enriched by, feminism. Incorporating distinctive Confucian conceptual tools such as ren (benevolent governance), xiao (filial care), you (friendship), li (ritual), and datong (great community), Rosenlee creates an ethic of care that is feminist and Confucian. At the same time she confronts the issue of gender inequity in Confucian thought. Her hybrid feminist theory not only broadens the range of feminist understandings of the roots of gender oppression, but opens up what we believe constitutes gender liberation for women transnationally and transculturally. Here is a practical ethic that uses Confucianism to navigate th

Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson set out, their new collection, Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press, 2024) to challenge the traditional ways that scholarship has approached sexuality, gender nonconformity, and sex (as well as its absence) in the long eighteenth century. Drawing from recent and emerging criticisms in Middle-Eastern and Asian studies, Black studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies, the collected authors perform intersectional queer readings, reimagine queer historiographic methods, and spearhead new citational models that can invigorate the field. In charting multidirectional queer horizons, this collection locates new prospective desires and intimacies in the literature, culture, and media of the period to imagine new directions and simultaneously unsettle eighteenth-century studies. This book is available open source here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premiu

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid garments that women had been obliged to wear for centuries. They slipped into light, mobile dresses, cropped their hair short, wrapped themselves in shawls, and championed the handbag. Juliette made the new style stand for individual liberty. The erotic audacity of these fashion revolutionaries conquered Europe, starting with Napoleon. Everywhere a fashion magazine could reach, women imitated the news coming from Paris. It was the fastest and most total change in clothing history. Two centuries ahead of its time, it was rolled back after only a decade by misogynist rumors of obscene extravagance. As Dr. Anne Higonnet s

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker's midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words. White's biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker--Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles,

Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’ This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your

Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, translators, poets, playwrights, and essayists to see how they both reacted to and in turn shaped cultural discourses, especially around learned women and the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. From Marie de Gournay's polemic translations to the conteuses fairy tales, Greco-Roman culture provided inspiration, authorization, and means of self-fashioning for a wide range of women writers. Women Writing Antiquity is perfect for readers interested in classical reception, women's writers, authorial strategies, gender history, and French literature. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual hist

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens of reproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for women who face immense barriers to access abortion, or to parent their children safely. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, adoption increasingly functions as an institution that perpetuates reproductive injustice by separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family building for middle-upper-class white people. Based on hundreds of in-depth interviews, Relinquished centers and amplifies the voices of relinquishing mothers, and fills an important gap in the national conversation about reproductive politics and justice.  Shui-

In All the Rage: Power, Pain, Pleasure: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty 1860-1960 (Pegasus Book, 2024) richly detailed account, Virginia Nicholson provides a richly detailed account to take us to the Frontline of Beauty to reveal the power, the pain and the pleasure involved in adorning the female body. At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than at any other period. Who determines which shape is currently 'all the rage'? Looking at how custom, colour, class and sex fit into the picture, this book also charts how the advances made by feminism collided with the changing shape of desirability. Here are the 'New Women' who discovered freedom by bobbing their hair; the boyish, athletic 'Health and Beauty' ladies in black knickers; and starlets in bohemian beachwear. Among the first to experience true women's liberation were the early adopters of trousers. Encompassing two world war

There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises (Rutgers UP, 2023) interrogates the representation of ostensibly powerful women in transmedia franchises, examining how presumed feminine traits—love, empathy, altruism, diplomacy—are alternately lauded and repudiated as possibilities for effecting long-lasting social change. By questioning how these franchises reimagine their protagonists over time, the book reflects on the role that gendered exceptionalism plays in social and political action, as well as what forms of knowledge and power are presumed distinctly feminine. The franchises explored in this book illustrate the ambivalent (post)feminist representation of women protagonists as uniquely gifted in ways both gendered and seemingly ungendered, and yet inherently bound to expressions of their femininity. At heart, There She Goes Again asks under what terms and in what contexts women protagonists are imagined, envisioned, embodied, and replicated in media.

Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave (Fourth Estate: 2024), should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so. She juggles several relationships, each one slowly imploding as the novel continues. And she butts heads with an oblivious and pompous bureaucrat, nicknamed “The Pontiff.” Rohit Manchanda is a professor at IIT Bombay where he teaches and researches computational neurophysiology. His first novel won a Betty Trask Award, was published with the title In the Light of the Black Sun and was republished in 2024 titled A Speck of Coal Dust. The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, coming decades after his first published work. In this episode, Rohit and I talk about his writing career, the themes of The Enclave, and the very real struggle of wanting, but not having the energy, to