New Books In Gender Studies

In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces? Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton UP, 2021) examines how a range of underlying mechanisms-gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories-afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, Swethaa Ballakrishnen reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organization

New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative.  In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rachel Louise Moran explores the history of the naming and mainstreaming of postpartum depression. Coalitions of maverick psychiatrists, psychologists, and women who themselves had survived substantial postpartum distress fought to legitimize and normalize women’s experiences. They argued that postpartum depression is an objective and real illness and fought to avoid it being politicized alongside other fraught medical and political battles over women’s health. Based on insightful oral histories and in-depth archival research, Blue reveals a secret hi

Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Routledge, 2024) explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide insights on the scale and nature of queer kinship in diverse geopolitical locations and the complexities of lived experiences of queer families. Drawing on a rich qualitative multi-method study to address the gap in queer kinship studies which tend to exclude Polish or wider Central and Eastern perspectives, it offers a multi-dimensional picture of ‘families of choice’ improving sensitivity towards differences in queer kinship studies. Through case studies and interviews with diverse members of queer families (i.e., queer parents, their children) and their families of origin (parents and siblings), the book looks at

In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale UP, 2024), Sara Lodge tells stories of women who brought 19th century criminals to justice, in real life and popular culture, as unacknowledged crime-fighters and feminist icons.  On stage and in fiction, women detectives were sensational figures who fascinated the public with cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroines who captured thieves, flushed out cheats, and solved murders. Few people realize that these characters were based on real women who were active as detectives in private agencies and in the Victorian police force. Far from the mythology of an all-male world, women were a daily presence in police activity, although often underpaid and overlooked. They did important and dangerous work in a variety of roles both openly and as undercover agents.  While the fictional characters were heroic figures who always saved the day, these morally ambiguous real women were sometimes paid to betray, deceive, or entrap in the murky underworld of Victorian

Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms in the 1970s and 1980s. These spheres encompassed activists in the ūman ribu (women’s liberation) movement, members of the rezubian (lesbian) community, and artists and readers of queer shōjo  manga (girls’ comics). Individually and collectively, they found the normative understanding of the category “women” untenable and worked to redefine and expand its meaning by transfiguring ideas, images, and practices selectively appropriated from the “West.” They did so, however, while remaining firmly fixed on the local. Thus, for many, this ostensibly Western focus was not a turn away from Japan but integral to their understanding of being a woman within Japan. Following broad historical overviews of the ūman ribu, rezubian, and queer shōjo manga spheres, th

Applying the "influencer" concept to the study of religion, Gurus, Priestesses, Saints, Mediums and Yoginis: Holy Women as Influencers in Hindu Culture (MDPI, 2024) explores the varieties of strategies that holy women use for gaining and expressing power in diverse roles. It examines different concepts of holiness and leadership for men and women, the role of charisma, and the arenas of activity and accomplishment for holy women in India and abroad. By relating a new idea-that of the 'influencer'-to the study of women and religious authority, the Issue contributes fresh and refined analyses and explanatory models toward a greater understanding of women's evolving relationship to the Hindu tradition.  This book is available open-access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory (Duke UP, 2024), Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize their prose to ask readers to feel, undo, and reassemble themselves. These intimate invitations are more than a set of tools for decoding the social world; Black feminist prose becomes a mode of living and feeling, dreaming and being, and a distinctly affective project that treats loss as not only paradigmatic of Black life but also an aesthetic question. Through her own beautiful writing, Nash shows how Black feminism offers itself as a companion to readers to chart their own lives with and in loss, from devastating personal losses to organizing around the movement for Black lives. Charting her own losses, Nash remi

In Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Duke UP, 2024), Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same way—make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity.  Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives, ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations, to write reparative histories of queerness. Chin’s proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes, and it extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming t

Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions around the globe have increasingly incorporated gender perspectives. These initiatives have used both development programs and gender mainstreaming to advance women's empowerment, with the aim of making peacebuilding more effective as well as building more stable societies and efficient economies. This goal has been manifested in a wide range of programs and projects-or "gender interventions"—including economic empowerment measures, gender quotas, gender-responsive budgeting, and legal reforms. Yet, the results have been uneven, provoking a sizable debate among scholars and practitioners seeking to explain the shortcomings and improve the outcomes. In Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Melissa Johnston explains why gender interventions often fail to help those who most nee

Challenging mainstream narratives in political economy, the new book Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective (Agenda Publishing, 2023) serves as an introduction to a new era of critical research. It is written by Prof. Sara Cantillon, Dr. Sara Stevano and Prof. Odile Mackett, who have carried out incredible work to deconstruct gender-blind approaches in contemporary economic research. The book brings together the most important topics in political economy and demonstrates why feminist approaches are crucial to understanding social relations. It begins with an overview of feminist political economy and then offers a nuanced perspective on care, social reproduction, inequalities in households and labour markets, and the feminisation of poverty. As mentioned in the podcast, the book not only takes a feminist approach to theory, but is also an example of the practice of feminist research, focusing for example on female scholars. The host, Sarah Vogelsanger, is a feminist researcher, who is interested in

Antoinette Burton's Gender History: A Very Short Introduction introduces the field of gender history--its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the 1970s. Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject, what difference gender makes, and how attention to it subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past--and what they are today. The book explores how gender analysis has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration, and empire. As a field, gender history has been extraordinarily influential in shaping several generations of scholars and students. The fact that its early emphasis on t

Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework. Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Dr. Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to im

In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Dr. Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Dr. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces w

This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy. For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural imagination. Today, those with the means can hire professionals to help sort and declutter their homes. In More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Carrie M. Lane introduces us to this world of professional organizers and offers new insight into the domains of work and home, which are forever entangled—especially for women. The female-dominated organizing profession didn’t have a name until the 1980s, but it is now the subject of countless reality shows, podcasts, and magazines. Lane draws on interviews with organizers, including many of the field’s founders, to trace the profession’s history and uncover its enduring appeal to those seeking

What identity does the post-2000s Inland Tibet Class (ITC) generation mean? How do Sinophone-Tibetan films articulate the expression of such identity? How does affective visuality mediate the cultural, political, and gender identity formation of female artists of the post-2000s ITC generation? Jinyan Zeng, a researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, introduces her research in this podcast episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, hosted by Ning Ao, PhD student at the Centre. The episode is produced by Lisa Sihvonen, student intern at the Centre. China has introduced a policy of Inland Tibet Class (ITC) to educate talented Tibetan pupils from Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in Chinese language boarding schools since 1985. Jinyan Zeng’s recent article Visualising the Post-2000s Inland Tibet Class Generation focuses on the experiences of female artists, filmmakers, and writers of the ITC who were born in the 1990s and early 2000s. Following the experience of the Sinophone

Shehnaz Haqqani's new book Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender (Oneworld 2024), masterfully blends textual analysis of pre-modern and modern Islamic consensus with qualitative interviews with Muslims in the contemporary United States, to track how notions of what constitutes Islamic and Islamic tradition shift over time. We learn from her interlocutors that certain Islamic legal rulings can be negotiated, as in the case of child marriage, sexual slavery or even female inheritance, while other legal consensus, such as around women’s interfaith marriage or women leading mixed-gender prayers are not negotiable. Haqqani incisively swifts through these various standards of negotiations and arrives at how legal rulings pertaining to Muslim women’s experiences are met with resistance. It seems then that matters of urgency and relevance, which are inevitably political, dedicate when Islamic law and/or tradition can be negotiated. Haqqani’s book illuminates how Isla

Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry. Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applicat

In part two of our three-part series “Voices,” we feature an exciting new voice in the world of sound studies, Stacey Copeland.  In part one last month, we examined the role voices play in professional sports and unpacked some of the understandings of ability and masculinity that inform the sound of the quarterback’s voice in the NFL. Copeland’s audio documentary, “This is the Sound of My Voice,” examines another group of professionals—women broadcasters and podcasters, who struggle with sonic sexism from male colleagues, audiences, and sometimes, even themselves. The documentary was originally presented on radio in three parts, but Stacey graciously edited a shorter version for this episode of Phantom Power. Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier (CGS) Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Master of Arts from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program where she studied with a focus on radio

Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2022), Dr. Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a crit

In this compelling and informative interview, Carrie N. Baker discusses her newest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics (Amherst College Press, 2024). This book is the first comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States, and Baker examines the actions of scientists, policy-makers, pharmaceutical companies, pro-abortion rights activists and anti-abortion forces as the abortion pill was developed in France in 1980, and subsequently brought to market in the United States. She carefully investigates the fight for FDA approval of the abortion pill, and reproductive rights advocates’ work to expand access. She pays particular attention to the critical period of 2020-2024 when in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic telemedicine abortion became a possibility. Baker ends exploring attempts to restrict abortion pills and self-managed abortions in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision. In this thoroughly researched history, Baker draws on interviews wi