New Books in Gender Studies

Systemic sexual violence by the Myanmar army and proxies began to be widely reported in the 2010s, in the course of genocidal violence against Rohingya in the country's west. At the same time, the Myanmar government, which was then a military-civilian hybrid, negotiated with international organisations to set up a mechanism to monitor and deal with the violence. In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Phyu Phyu Oo discusses her research on this violence, and attempts to deal with it through the United Nations system, published as Conflict-related Sexual Violence in Myanmar: The Role of the State (De Gruyter, 2025). In the course of the interview she explains what Conflict-Related Sexual Violence is, efforts to address it through international agreements and law, and the conditions in Myanmar, where CRSV has a long history, and has been documented by women's and right's groups since the 1990s. She also reflects on the current conditions and future prospects for addressing CRSV in Myanmar. For more on the work of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women, in which Phyu Phyu is a research fellow, visit the CEVAW website. Like this interview? You might also be interested in Elliot Prasse-Freeman discussing Rights Refused, Ken MacLean on Crimes in Archival Form, and Lynette Chua talking about The Politics of Love in Myanmar This interview summary was not synthesised by a machine. Unlike that machinery, the author gave thought to its contents. And unlike the makers and owners of those machines, he accepts responsibility for those contents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Notre Dame University Political Scientists Dave Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht have a new book that focuses on the impression that female candidates make on young people, specifically on young people in the United States. This is a fascinating analysis since it fleshes out, with a sizeable study, the idea that candidates running for office, particularly female candidates, leave a lasting impact on younger people, even if they do not win. Studying role models has not been a focus in political science per se, but Campbell and Wolbrecht have brought together work from social psychology, democratic theory, political science, and gender studies to craft an understanding of role models within the context of campaigns and elections.See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People⁠ (U of Chicago Press, 2025) is an important exploration of the connection between those who run for office, particularly those who may look different than the expected “norm”, and how that very action has long-term impacts on younger voters, particularly adolescents and teenagers. One of the unique perspectives of the research in See Jane Run is the focus on younger people and their engagement with politics. As the authors note, there is not that much political science research that explores the interactions between young people and politics—especially before those young people can vote. The authors also explain that teenagers generally identify with a partisan affiliation, which means that Campbell and Wolbrecht were able to sort the individuals into partisan groups and track the impact of women candidates within these partisan contexts. They found that female candidates clearly influenced two distinct groups within the study: Democratic young women and Republican young men. Young women saw these female candidates (both Republican and Democratic) as reflecting a more inclusive political environment, and the analysis suggests that this has a long-term impact, making these young women more engaged with the political process and democracy over time. The Republican young men responded as well, seeing female candidates as pursuing something—political activity—that they determined they were also qualified to pursue. The outcomes of the research in See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People also had racial dimensions, including exploring the impact on young Black men, who became less engaged in politics when a woman of color was running for office. See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People explores what has been essentially folklore about the impact of political role models on young people by pulling together data and research to flesh out an understanding of these notions that we all have about candidates for political office, role models, and the impacts on younger people. Please check out Brain Lair Books (in South Bend, Indiana or online) to purchase a copy of See Jane Run. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Karen Redrobe's latest book Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (Univ of California Press, 2025) is a fascinating account of the role of animation in the visual cultures of war. It analyzes works by artists including Yael Bartana, Nancy Davenport, Kelly Dolak and Wazhmah Osman, Gesiye, David Hartt, Helen Hill, Onyeka Igwe, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Mary Reid Kelley, and Patrick Kelley, in which relational and intermedial practices of “(inter)(in)animation” generate aesthetic tactics for reframing war. Like all of Karen's work, Undead is theoretically rich, thoroughly interdisciplinary, and written with clarity as well as urgency. Its mixture of clear-sighted criticality and dogged hopefulness is especially powerful in the times of conflict, cruelty, and destructiveness through which we're living. In this wide-ranging conversation, Karen speaks with refreshing honesty and vulnerability about how to reimagine scholarly research and writing in line with anti-war feminist politics, what it means to confront the complicity of the university—and of university workers—in cultures of war, and why scholars should embrace being wrong and taking risks. Undead was published in April 2025 by the University of California Press. A free ebook version is available through Luminos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Papusza / Bronisława Wajs. Tears of Blood: A Poet's Witness Account of the Nazi Genocide of Roma (Brill, 2024) is nothing less of an academic, literary, and historical miracle. It is dedicated to a key figure of Romani literature, Bronisława Wajs, also known as Papusza. This book offers—for the very first time in history—the full version of Papusza's key work, Tears of Blood, which was considered lost for seventy years and circulated only in a highly reduced copy. This poem is a unique account by a woman about the Roma Holocaust in Eastern Europe during WWII. Beyond this important historical and literary document, the book also provides literary translations of this manuscript into several languages, including English, and has chapters written by leading researchers of Romani Studies who comment on the history of this text and the challenges behind making it available to the broader public. It took the team over three decades to locate the manuscript, transcribe it, translate it, and fill in the gaps in its history. Volha Bartash is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster in Germany and a co-convenor of the network “Margins of Memory: Cultures and Politics of Non-Hegemonic Remembrance.”  Tomasz Kamusella is Reader in Modern Central and Eastern European History at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on language politics and nationalism. Host: Tatiana Klepikova is a Freigeist Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation and leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism at the University of Regensburg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of Japanese exclusion. Gomez's work joins together an analysis of picture brides, or Japanese women who migrated to the United States to join husbands whom they married [in absentia] in the early 20th century, with war brides, or Japanese women who married American military servicemen after World War II. By combining the analysis of these two categories, Gomez centralizes the overlapping and conflicting logics to either racially exclude Japanese or facilitate their inclusion via immigration legislation that privileged wives and mothers. In short, the book tells a story of how the interplay between societal norms and political interests can both harness and contradict the interconnected frameworks of race, gender, and sexuality. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adopted 'homeland' to their socially constructed new 'ancestral' home in Armenia. The rich ethnographic research conducted over 6 years by the author reveals how women adjusted to new lives in Armenia, supported themselves through gendered work such as embroidery production, yet mostly challenge simple identities such as 'refugee' or 'repatriate, ' existing in a state of what the author terms "painful belonging". The book further reveals crucial insight into how experiences and traumatic memories of war in Syria and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reciprocally shape each other in the minds of the women interviewed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel the various problems with how we medically treat uteruses and the people who have them.Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Andréa Becker weaves centuries of medical history with rich qualitative data from 100 women, trans men, and nonbinary people who had, want, or are considering hysterectomy. In compelling detail, Dr. Becker reveals how America's healthcare system routinely deprives people of the ability to control their own bodies along race and gender lines. When people ask for a hysterectomy, they are often met with pushback: Are you sick enough? Old enough? Have you had enough babies? Will you regret this? How will your future husband feel about this? Yet this pushback is not equally experienced. While some people are barred access, others are ushered toward a hysterectomy. These contradictory recommendations reveal the persistent biases entrenched within healthcare.Get It Out interrogates how little choice people with uteruses ultimately have over their reproductive health, and explores what these “choices” signify amid interlocking systems of inequality. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

No-one can fail to notice how many statues of Great Men there are around London: stern politicians, military generals, imperial adventurers . . . But what about women? As shown by Juliet Rix in London's Statues of Women (SafeHaven Books, 2025), women are surprisingly well represented amongst London's statues. Recent years have seen new statues of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, Mary Wollstonecraft in Stoke Newington, even boxer Nicola Adams in Brent. But there are also groundbreaking statues commemorating the Black community, notably the two of Brixton resident Joy Battick on its railway station platforms. And you'll find historical figures from Florence Nightingale to Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell – as well as Twiggy. And how many ballet dancers are commemorated, and where? And which famous tennis player was the unlikely model for the young girl with dolphin by Tower Bridge? This is a book that really will make you see London in a new way. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Dr. Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and in the postcolonial Global South utilized airlines of their own to forge rival pathways to modernization. Part of this modernization involved norms for working women. Stewardesses at airlines around the globe encountered novel threats to their dignity as the Jet Age approached. By the late 1960s, stewardesses endured harsh objectification: High hemlines, tight uniforms, and raunchy marketing were touted as modern and liberated. These women, whether from the West, East, or South, forged their own pathways to achieve greater dignity at work. In Women and the Jet Age, Dr. Tiemeyer's global account of the rise of air travel and of early feminist strivings among stewardesses is one of the first histories to place such developments—political, economic, and feminist—in dialogue with each other. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This inclusion, however, has come at a cost. In the 1970s, these professionals sought to radically transform STEM fields by confronting the homophobia and sexism embedded within them. Instead, these fields became more corporatized and privatized, and STEM institutions and workspaces—particularly in the spheres of government and business—became dominated by a focus on individualism, self-improvement/advancement, and meritocracy, which are hallmarks of neoliberalism. For many LGBTQ STEM professionals, inclusion now required becoming more apolitical, pro-capital, and focused on professional development.In Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025), Dr. Tom Waidzunas, Dr. Ethan Czuy Levine, and Dr. Brandon Fairchild explore this transformation of LGBTQ STEM professionals from oppositional outsiders to assimilationist insiders. Drawing on historical archives, oral interviews, and participant observation of professional societies and workspaces, the authors interrogate the meanings of “inclusion” and why some LGBTQ STEM professionals have benefited from it more than others. They also advocate for a “queer STEM” that challenges and transforms the racism, classism, sexism, cisheterosexism, and imperialism of these fields, institutions, and workspaces. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Out Doing Science will appeal to readers interested in LGBTQ studies, and science and technology studies, as well as anyone who wants to create a more diverse and inclusive work environment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen. In a wide-ranging and enjoyable interview with Dr. Elana Levine, we covered a broad array of subjects pertaining to the history, culture, and craft of soap operas. After an initial conversation, I asked her a series of questions about her work and how it resonates with other genres such as the Real Housewives franchise, especially how original housewives (domestic workers as well as suburban housewives of numerous ethnicities and races) represented the viewership of soap opera consumption and support. We talked about the early origins of soap operas, especially with Proctor & Gamble in the early inception of the soap opera genre to now, with the innovative partnership and collaboration between Proctor and Gamble/CBS and the NAACP in debuting the new soap opera, Beyond the Gates.  We discussed the ways in which the viewership of soaps, mostly working women and stay at home women shed light on significant aspects of American Women's and Gender history, women's civic participation (combing public and private space) as well as informs how women viewers, often housewives and domestics, found ways to weave their own life narratives together with those of cast actors, thus contributing to an interpretive lens on life matter,(blurring line between real and imagined), representing both an innovative and inclusive type of Citizenship seasoning process, whereby, via interaction with soap operas stars as both celebrities and everyday people, (as fellow Cinema scholar Anna McCarthy talks about in her work on ways in which 1950s television, functioned as a kind of citizen machine governing America,  championed inclusive democratic practice that engaged citizens in repetitious call and response and back and forth conversation about everyday practices of everyday working people.  Lastly, we talked about the parallels with primetime soap operas like Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Yellowstone, as well as what Dr. Levine calls a hybrid form of soap opera storytelling found in series like Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and other primetime television series. We also spoke about the parallels between soap operas as meditations on aspects of good and evil, finding interesting synergy with genres such as wrestling as soap opera drama sport, the drama of superheroes and villains in the DC and Marvel Universe, as well as versions of science fiction. Dr. Elana Levine is Professor of Media, Cinema and Digital Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She got her PhD, Communication Arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research areas of interest include Television history, theory, and criticism; gender, sexuality, and media; media industry and production studies; media audience studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, Fertile expectations: The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Margaret Andersen explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an "ideal" family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France's birthrate, pronatalist activists pushed for financial benefits, propaganda, and punitive measures to counter declining fertility. Situating infertility within this history, the author details innovations in fertility medicine, cultural awareness of artificial insemination, and changing laws on child adoption. These practices offered new ways of responding to infertility and formed part of a growing expectation of being able to control one's fertility and family size. This book presents the political and cultural context for understanding why private questions about when to start a family, how many children to have, and how to cope with involuntary childlessness, evolved and became part of state demographic policies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 the fifth episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with British music critic Jon Savage about how LGBTQ resistance shaped American popular music from the 1950s to the 1980s. Savage discusses the curious and queer roots of the word punk stretching back to the time of Shakespeare when it was used to connote ambiguous and transgressive gender and sexuality. Those meanings carried through to the 1970s though their origins may have been obscured by popular culture.  Jon Savage is the award-winning author of England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991) and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945 (2007) and his latest book, The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture, 1955-1979 (2024). He is the writer of the award-winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein Story (1988) and Joy Division (2007), as well as the feature film Teenage (2013). His compilations include Meridian 1970 (Heavenly/EMI 2005) and Queer Noises: From the Closet to the Charts, 1961-1976 (Trikont 2006).  Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Gotham Center for NYC History - CUNY GCDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the UK is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day. Looking across six systems – the police and the recording of hate crimes; dating apps and digital desire; outness in the film and television industry; borders and LGBTQ asylum seekers; health and fitness activities; and DEI initiatives in the workplace – Rainbow Trap documents how inclusive interventions – such as new legislation, revamped diversity policies and tech fixes – have attempted to bring historically marginalized communities out of the shadows.Yet, as part of the bargain, LGBTQ people need to locate themselves in an ever-growing list of classifications, categories and labels to 'make sense' to the very systems they are seeking to access. This requirement to be classified catches LGBTQ communities in a rainbow trap. Because when we look beyond the welcoming veneer of inclusive interventions, we uncover sorting processes that determine what LGBTQ lives are valued and what queer futures are possible. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Enrique Fernández and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, eds. Death and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2024). In premodern Europe, the gender identity of those waiting for Doomsday in their tombs could be reaffirmed, readjusted, or even neutralized. Testimonies of this renegotiation of gender at the encounter with death is detectable in wills, letters envisioning oneself as dead, literary narratives, provisions for burial and memorialization, the laws for the disposal of those executed for heinous crimes and the treatment of human remains as relics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through character allegations that label them as 'bad' women in need of control, or 'mad' women not to be trusted. Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Daanika Kamal explores why the subjectivities of women victims are constructed in particular ways, and how these subjectivities are captured and negotiated in the Pakistani legal system.Drawing on feminist poststructuralist accounts relating to the use of gendering strategies in institutional and disciplinary settings and based on an analysis of over a hundred case files and judgements, seventy-two interviews, and court observations in three cities of Pakistan, this book shadows the experiences of women victims of domestic violence in both criminal law and family law proceedings. It captures and offers empirical insights in relation to gendered subject formation in discursive spaces; ranging from the use of societal narratives that minimise and silence women's harms, to the deployment of police mechanisms that assist in maintaining the 'secrecy' of familial violence, and the application and enactment of boilerplate lawyerly strategies to present alternative legal 'truths.'Amidst regulations of the public versus the private and understandings of rights versus duties, Domestic Violence in Pakistan explores how these practices construct the victim-subject of domestic violence in a way that not only subjectivise her, but also secure her within the field of that subjectification; setting her up to be viewed by the judiciary through the lens of the allegations applied to her. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Political Scientist Angela K. Lewis-Maddox has pulled together an important and useful edited volume focusing on black women political scientists and their experiences in the discipline itself and in studying topics that include race and gender. Political Science, as a discipline, is a bit more than 100 years old, and studies politics, power, institutions, policy, methodology, and theory. These are the over-arching umbrellas within the discipline and many of the specific areas within political science take up questions that are connected to these broad concepts. As with many dimensions of our society, race and gender play a role in the discipline itself and in what we study as political scientists. But race and gender have also been considered tertiary issues within the discipline in terms of research. Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline (SUNY Press, 2025) is both autobiographical for some of the contributors as well as a rigorous interrogation of political science as a discipline. Lewis-Maddox has assembled a group of scholars across rank and position, region and geography, kinds of institutions, and scholarly emphasis. This diverse assembly of contributors have reflected on their particular experience within political science and have written about that experience from a variety of perspectives and approaches. This is a rich and deep study of those who have found themselves to be “space invaders”—black women in spaces and places that are not designed for them. These women all bring the experience of interposing themselves in a place or in places where they are not accepted. And yet they have also persevered in these spaces, in institutions, and within the discipline, and they have considered how they operate professionally and personally in “hostile” territory. Part of the thrust of Disrupting Political Science is to encourage the reimagining of political science as a discipline, to challenge the norms and expectations that have remained in place for over a century. Angela K. Lewis-Maddox and her assembly of contributing authors have done a great service to the discipline of Political Science in publishing these analyses and considerations. Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline is shining a light on those who have often been obscured within the boundaries of the academic discipline—either because of who they are or because of what they study. Political Science is truly an expansive discipline, and to understand the world in which we live, individuals or groups should not be marginalized or erased, but re-centered and engaged. This book goes far in helping to refocus and consider otherwise obscured dimensions of political science and political scientists. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

When singer Debbie Harry helped form Blondie in 1974 she developed a unique stage persona to front the band. Though she may have appeared to fans as a hyper-femme caricature, Harry recalls her role as androgynous or "transexual" in her 2019 memoir Face It. In the third episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Cornell University professor of music Judith Peraino, and  University of Iowa cultural studies professor Kembrew McLeod about the stylistic and social forces that shaped gender-bending bands like Blondie and others in the early “punk” scene in 1970s New York.  Judith Peraino is the author of multiple publications on rock music and constructions of gender. This includes We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2025) co-edited with Tom McEnaney, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkley.  McLeod is a cultural critic and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of Parallel Lines in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Series (2016) and the critically acclaimed history The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock 'N' Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture. (Abrams Press, 2018)  Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show 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 the premiere episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with celebrated writer Lucy Sante about the landscape of gender logics within the New York rock scene. It was a nebulous soundscape of counterculture formed around gender explorations and social upheaval set to the soundtrack of an aggressive style of rock 'n' roll that critics would identify as punk rock by the end of the seventies.   Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years of teaching at Bard College.  Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nation wrestled with its identity. During the colonial period, hair was usually seen as bodily discharge, even “excrement.” But as Dr. Sarah Gold McBride shows in Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025), hair gradually came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grew—even truths they wanted to hide. As the United States diversified—intensifying divisions over race, class, citizenship status, and region—Americans sought to understand and classify one another through the revelatory power of hair: its color, texture, length, even the shape of a single strand. While hair styling had long offered clues about one's social status, the biological properties of hair itself gradually came to be seen as a scientific tell: a reliable indicator of whether a person was a man or a woman; Black, white, Indigenous, or Asian; Christian or heathen; healthy or diseased. Hair was even thought to illuminate aspects of personality—whether one was courageous, ambitious, or perhaps criminally inclined. Yet if hair was a teller of truths, it was also readily turned to purposes of deception in ways that alarmed some and empowered others. Indeed, hair helped many Americans to fashion statements about political belonging, to engage in racial or gender passing, and to reinvent themselves in new cities. A history inscribed in bangs, curls, and chops, Whiskerology illuminates a period in American history when hair indexed belonging in some ways that may seem strange—but in other ways all too familiar—today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

What happens when the 'modern woman' ages? Modernist Poetics of Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2025) answers this question by being the first book-length study of three late modernist women's writers. Drawing on their place within wider modernist networks, this monograph is primarily framed around work by Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes, who are often thought of as the quintessentially youthful 'modern woman' of the 1920s. Taking a literary, ageing studies and cultural criticism approach, this monograph focuses on lived experience, as well as thematic representations of ageing in their work, to examine how each author grew older in the years 1940-1982. By surveying literary texts, visual art, photography, life writing and archival material, this book explores the intersection of old age as lived and as well as written to argue that modernist late writing embodies the realities of ageing and transforms them through avant-garde aesthetics. As an interdisciplinary study, this work pairs ageing studies and modernist studies to innovatively consider experimental works written about and in later life. The book suggests that a focus on older age complicates the very avant-garde or modernist aesthetics that each author was interested in: what happens when the scene of the 'new' is populated by older people? How does an embodied experience of illness inform an aesthetics of 'late style'? After fulfilling their role as the youthful 'modern woman' of the 1920s, how did each artist continue to create rich, avant-garde works that go well beyond the paradigms of 'late modernism'? Modernist Poetics of Ageing argues that the late lives of some of modernism's most prominent and networked women writers are overlooked - despite being rich, vital, and contemporary in their continuing commitment to modernist experiment. By reframing these older modernist women writers as engaged in continuing, creative experiments, Modernist Poetics of Ageing reveals that the 'new' does not always have to be 'young'. About the author: Jade Elizabeth French works on ageing, care, and intergenerationality in modern and contemporary literature. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Loughborough University, developing a project on emotions, ageing, and care homes in post-war British novels since 1948. In 2021-2022, she was a Research Associate as part of the ESRC-funded project Reimagining the Future in Older Age. Jade is also the co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts project Decorating Dissidence, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic, and political qualities of craft from the twentieth century to today. About the host: Julyan Oldham is a Post-Award Member of the University of Oxford, where he recently completed a PhD on virginity in the early twentieth-century British novel. Julyan's work has been published or is forthcoming in Studies in the Novel and the Journal of Modern Literature. 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 Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons (Duke University Press, 2025), anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines rumba as a way of knowing the embodied and spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in post-Fidel Cuba. Historically a Black working-class popular dance, rumba, Berry contends, is a method of Black Cuban struggle that provides the community, accountability, sustenance, and dignity that neither the state nor the expanding private market can. Berry's feminist theorization builds on the notion of the undercommons to show how rumba creates a space in which its practitioners enact deeply felt and dedicatedly defended choreographies of reciprocity, refusal, sovereignty, devotion, and pleasure, both on stage and in their daily lives. Berry demonstrates that this Black corporeal undercommons emphasizes mutual aid and refuses neoliberal development logics, favoring instead a collective self-determination rooted in African diasporic spiritual practices through which material compensation and gendered power dynamics are negotiated. By centering rumba to analyze how poor Black Cubans navigate gendered and racialized life, Berry helps readers better understand the constraints and yearnings that move diasporic Black struggles to seek refuge beyond the bounds of the nation-state. Maya J. Berry is Assistant Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). 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 this exhilarating journey into underground parties, pulsating with life and limitless possibility, acclaimed author Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexpected revolution revitalizing urban nightlife. Drawing on Ghaziani's immersive encounters at underground parties in London and more than one hundred riveting interviews with everyone from bar owners to party producers, revelers to rabble-rousers, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2024) showcases a spectacular, if seldom-seen, vision of a queer world shimmering with self-empowerment, inventiveness, and joy. Amin Ghaziani is Professor of Sociology who has taught at Northwestern, Princeton, University of British Columbia, and UC Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women's Troubles: Gender and Feminist Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Claire Pierson sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination of feminist activism after the Northern Irish peace agreement. Utilising feminist frameworks and debates on movement building, policymaking, abortion rights, gender-based violence and the UN women, peace and security agenda, Dr. Pierson interrogates the opportunities and challenges in articulating a feminist voice and creating feminist spaces in the conflict transformational politics and society. Capturing the complexities of contemporary feminist movement building in a divided society, Women's Troubles contributes to ongoing analysis of contemporary global feminisms. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Children's picture books are some of the most transparently ideological materials available to parents and educators, and as cultural objects they are an expression of the zeitgeist of a particular era. They reveal much about the hopes, values, and aspirations of the society that produces them, as well as that society's vision of its place in the wider world at large.Children's Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society (AUC Press, 2025) by Dr. Yasmine Motawy examines a new wave of Egyptian picture books that was published in the current century to see how these books responded to larger societal trends and transformations in Egypt, as well as to explore the ideologies that lie behind them. Dr. Motawy argues that a host of factors, including the growth of gated communities and international schooling, the proliferation of lucrative literary awards, returning Gulf migrants, television dramas, and nationwide reading advocacy initiatives helped give rise to a new kind of children's picture book in Egypt.Dr. Motawy focuses on three clusters of selected picture books to investigate the extent to which these books reproduce hegemonic discourses or, alternatively, open up new horizons of childhood agency and societal transformation. The first cluster includes books that directly socialize the child by showing them ‘how things are done,' in both the domestic sphere and the increasing globalized spaces that children frequent with their families. The second cluster aims at reframing cultural notions around femininity through the retelling of folk and fairy tales, while the third cluster addresses children's abilities to assess the impact of their actions on their environment, and invites them to examine their personal suitability to positions of power and stewardship. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression. In Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings (Harper, 2025), Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women's public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women's ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks. Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers. Find author Honorée Fannone Jeffers at her website, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack. Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, Instagram, and Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How can technology creates new possibilities for transgender people? How do trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology? Trans Technologies, (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Oliver L. Haimson, explores how and why mainstream technologies often exclude or marginalize transgender users. Trans Technologies describes what happens when trans people take technology design into their own hands. Dr. Haimson, whose research into gender transition and technology has defined this area of study, draws on transgender studies and his own in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of technology—including apps, games, health resources, extended reality systems, and supplies designed to address challenges trans people face—to explain what trans technology is and to explore its present possibilities and limitations, as well as its future prospects.Dr. Haimson surveys the landscape of trans technologies to reveal the design processes that brought these technologies to life, and to show how trans people often must rely on community, technology, and the combination of the two to meet their basic needs and challenges. His work not only identifies the role of trans technology in caring for individuals within the trans community but also shows how trans technology creation empowers some trans people to create their own tools for navigating the world. Articulating which trans needs and challenges are currently being addressed by technology and which still need to be addressed; describing how trans technology creators are accomplishing this work; examining how privilege, race, and access to resources impact which trans technologies are built and who may be left out; and highlighting new areas of innovation to be explored, Trans Technologies opens the way to meaningful social change. Our guest is: Dr. Oliver Haimson, who is an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI) where he directs the Community Research on Identity and Technology (CRIT) Lab, and is affiliate faculty with the Digital Studies Institute (DSI) and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies (CATS). He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and a Henry Russel Award. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: More Than A Glitch Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters Raising Them Public Scholarship and Feminist Communications Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, eds. The Witch Studies Reader. (Duke University Press, 2025). Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies. Contributors. Maria Amir, Ruth Asiimwe, Bernadette Barton, Ethel Brooks, Shelina Brown, Ruth Charnock, Soma Chaudhuri, Carolyn Chernoff, Saira Chhibber, Simon Clay, Krystal Cleary, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, Tina Escaja, Laurie Essig, Marcelitte Failla, D Ferrett, Marion Goldman, Jaime Hartless, Margaretha Haughwout, Patricia Humura, Apoorvaa Joshi, Govind Kelkar, Oliver Kellhammer, Ayça Kurtoğlu, Helen Macdonald, Isabel Machado, Brandy Renee McCann, Dev Nathan, Mary Jo Neitz, Amy Nichols-Belo, Allison (or AP) Pierce, Emma Quilty, Anna Rogel, Karen Schaller, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Gabriella V. Smith, Nathan Snaza, Shannon Hughes Spence, Eric Steinhart, Morena Tartari, Nicole Trigg, Katie Von Wald, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Jane Ward Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Stories of teen sexting scandals, cyberbullying, and image-based sexual abuse have become commonplace fixtures of the digital age, with many adults struggling to identify ways to monitor young people's digital engagement. In When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age (Univ of California Press, 2023), Anna Gjika argues that rather than focusing on surveillance, we should examine such incidents for what they tell us about youth peer cultures and the gender norms and sexual ethics governing their interactions. Drawing from interviews with teens and high-profile cases of mediated juvenile sexual assault, Gjika exposes the deeply unequal and heteronormative power dynamics informing teens' intimate relationships and online practices, and she critically interrogates the role of digital cultures and broader social values in sanctioning abuse. The book also explores the consequences of social media and digital evidence for young victim-survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault, detailing the paradoxical capacities of technology for social and legal responses to gender-based violence. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research on: 1.) escape rooms 2.) the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email (johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

An exploration of workplace participation and earnings patterns for diverse women in US STEM professions that upends the myth that STEM work benefits women economically. Seen as part economic driver, part social remedy, STEM work is commonly understood to benefit both the US economy and people—particularly women—from underrepresented groups. But what do diverse women find when they work in US STEM occupations? What do STEM jobs really deliver—and for whom? In Disparate Measures: The Intersectional Economics of Women in STEM Work (MIT Press, 2024), Mary Armstrong and Susan Averett challenge the conventional wisdom that a diverse US STEM workforce will bring about economic abundance for the women who participate in it. Combining intersectionality theory and critical data theory with a feminist economic analysis, the authors explore how different groups of diverse women truly fare in US STEM professions.Disparate Measures is centered on eight unique, in-depth case studies, each of which provides an intersectional economic analysis (a term coined by the authors) of diverse women working in STEM occupations. Four case studies prioritize women of color and examine the STEM participation and earnings of Black women, American Indian and Alaska Native women, Asian and Pacific Islander women, and Hispanic women/Latinas; four additional case studies illuminate intersections that are frequently neglected by the STEM inclusivity literature: foreign-born women, women with disabilities, Queer women, and mothers. What the authors find in their groundbreaking, detailed analysis is that the promises of STEM are only partly true: when compared to women not working in STEM, most women are indeed economically elevated by STEM occupations—yet when compared to white men in the same STEM occupations, women's second-class status is usually reaffirmed. The authors conclude by offering seven “big-picture” recommendations for rethinking STEM equity, showing just how we can successfully confront the entrenched patterns of economic disadvantage faced by diverse women in STEM jobs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States (SUNY Press, 2025) takes an empathic approach to an embattled subject. Sweeping in scope and deeply personal in nature, this groundbreaking volume traces the development of transgender medicine across three centuries-centering the voices of transgender individuals, debunking myths about gender-affirming care, and empowering readers to grasp the complexities of this evolving field. More than forty contributors-including patients, advocates, physicians, psychologists, and scholars-weave an illuminating, sometimes surprising narrative of collaboration and conflict between trans people and the scientists who have studied and worked with them. An indispensable guide to understanding the current tumult surrounding trans health-care access in the United States, the volume underscores a crucial message: gender diversity is not a new phenomenon but an integral part of our shared human history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture. Alexandria Russell illuminates the process of memorialization while placing African American women at the center of memorials they brought into being and others constructed in their honor. Their often undocumented and unheralded work reveals the importance of the memorializers and public memory crafters in establishing a culture of recognition. Forced to strategize with limited resources, the women operated with a resourcefulness and savvy that had to meet challenges raised by racism, gender and class discrimination, and specific regional difficulties. Yet their efforts from the 1890s to the 2020s shaped and honed practices that became indispensable to the everyday life and culture of Black Americans. Intersectional and original, Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen and Unseen (Illinois University Press, 2024) explores the memorialization of African American women and its distinctive impact on physical and cultural landscapes throughout the United States. Dr. Alexandria Russell is the Executive Director of the Boston Women's Heritage Trail and a WEB Du Bois Research Institute Non-Residential Fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Dr. Russell continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Kevin Anderson's The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), this volume turns specifically to the ‘late Marx'. In this period (1869-82), Marx spent much of his time engrossed in the study of colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender among many other less known topics of his interest. His notes, especially what come to be known as The Ethnological Notebooks, along with letters, essays and a scattering of published texts remain only poorly known (and in some cases unpublished or not yet fully translated into English) and form the backbone of Anderson's study. They evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson shows how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat being touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power. In our discussion, we highlight some of the key themes in the late Marx, bringing out the ways in which Marx is making connections across his writings, how colonial subjects in Ireland and India share commonalities and what can be seen when we look at communal social forms in Russia and among Native Americans. We also discuss why Marx can be seen as a decolonial thinker, consider what he might have produced had he lived longer and the ways in which the late Marx can be presented to students to complement his central themes of class and capitalism. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The debate over the inclusion of gender diverse people in sport has become the latest battleground in the fight for basic human rights and equality. Trans and nonbinary people around the world are facing physical harm and violence—including death—at unprecedented rates. In Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes (Beacon Press, 2025), trans athlete Harrison Browne and investigative journalist Rachel Browne reveal how the opposition towards gender diverse athletes is fueled by fear and a moral panic as opposed to facts around what makes “a level playing field.” Interweaving Harrison's firsthand experience as a transgender athlete with exclusive accounts—from athletes, coaches, policymakers, and advocates on the front lines—Let Us Play dismantles the illusion that sports have ever been fair, that trans athletes pose a threat to women's sports, and that gender-affirming healthcare for athletes should be prohibitive to play. Calling for a reframing of the binaries from youth and high school levels all the way to the national leagues, Browne and Browne offer a new path forward, led by solutions proposed by gender diverse athletes themselves. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Isabella Andreini, Letters, ed. and trans. Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Iter Press of the University of Toronto, 2023. Winner of the Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition (2024) from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender  Welcome! My guest is Professor Paola Da Santo, Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia, who has some fascinating things to say about Isabella Andreini (1562–1604), an actress, poet, and playwright renowned for her literary and theatrical skill.   Acclaimed as "la divina Isabella," Andreini toured Italy and France as part of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. Letters (Iter Press, 2023) is a collection of epistles she wrote written in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. Andreini remade the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreini's modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love and examines—from surprising perspectives—pertinent issues such as death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Tamar Shirinian is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her new book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia (Duke UP, 2024), studies the relationships between gender, sexuality, nationalism, political-economy, and social reproduction and how these are experienced, imagined, and felt—especially, in the postsocialist and post-Soviet world. Focused on the Republic of Armenia, Survival of a Perverse Nation examines LGBTQ and feminist organizations as well as grass roots initiatives, right-wing nationalist movements, and the links these formations have within geopolitics. In so doing, it offers us invaluable lessons for feminist theory and practice in the context of right-wing populist hegemony. About the host: Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed—and why having XX or XY chromosomes isn't as conclusive as some would have us believe. In this lively and provocative book, leading biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes begins by tracing the origin and evolution of sex, describing the many ways in the animal kingdom of being female, male, or both. Turning to humans, he presents compelling evidence from the fossil and archaeological record that attests to the diversity of our ancestors' sexual bonds, gender roles, and family and community structures, and shows how the same holds true in the lived experiences of people today. Fuentes tackles hot-button debates around sports and medicine, explaining why we can acknowledge that females and males are not the same while also embracing a biocultural reality where none of us fits neatly into only one of two categories. Bringing clarity and reason to a contentious issue, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary (Princeton University Press, 2025) shares a scientist's perspective on why a binary view of sex and gender is not only misguided but harmful, and why there are multitudes of ways of being human. Agustín Fuentes is professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. 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 light of recent conversations about the crisis of masculinity, let's revisit Dr. Andy Oler's book Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature. I sat down with Dr. Oler to discuss the persistent anxiety about masculinity, the role of regional literature in American modernism, and the need for an expansive definition of the Midwest. We also talked about literary representation of futuristic equipment such as the cabbage transplanter. And for our scholar friends, Dr. Oler offers tips on how to secure texts that are not available in libraries or archives.  Andy Oler is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach.  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 1849, the Mary Ann Shadd Cary had not yet become one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America. She was decades away from being admitted to Howard University's Law School and becoming the first Black woman to so enroll in the United States. She had not yet begun to lobby for women's right to vote, and she had not yet emigrated to Canada, where she would rise to prominence as a formidable abolitionist and emigrationist. Though many years would pass before she made a name for herself as a gifted writer, editor, lecturer, educator, lawyer, and suffragist, in 1849, Mary Ann Shadd Cary was already certain of one thing: “We should do more, and talk less.” Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2023) includes letters, newspaper articles, organizational records, and never-before-published handwritten notes and essay drafts that illustrate how Shadd Cary participated in major Africana philosophical debates during the nineteenth century. Racial uplift, women's rights, emigration, citizenship and economic self-determination for Black people in general and Black women in particular, were all subjects of Shadd Cary's writings and activism throughout her lifetime, shaping Black radical theory and praxis. She is one of many nineteenth-century Black women theorists whose intellectual contributions are often overlooked. By interrogating Shadd Cary's Black radical ethic of care, this book reveals the philosophies that have shaped Black women's centuries-long struggle for rights and freedom. Nneka D. Dennie is Assistant Professor of History, core faculty in Africana Studies, and affiliate faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington and Lee University. She is also co-founder and president of the Black Women's Studies Association. Dr. Dennie's research examines Black feminism and Black intellectual thought with an emphasis on nineteenth-century African American women thinkers. Her work has been published in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; Feminist Studies; Atlantic Studies: Global Currents; The Routledge Companion to Black Women's Social and Cultural Histories; The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois, and more. You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Dr. Dennie continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today's most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, in Supervillains: The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2025) Dr. Nao Tomabechi troubles overly hero-centered works in comics studies to reconsider the modern American myths of the superheroes. Considering the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Loki, Venom, and more, Supervillians explores themes such as gender and sexuality, disability, and many forms of Otherness in relation to the notion of evil as it appears in the superhero genre. The book investigates how supervillains uphold and, at times, trouble dominant ideals expressed by the heroism of our superheroes. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018 (Edinburgh UP, 2024) studies narratives of Irish female and feminized development, arguing that these postmodern  narratives present Irish female maturation as disordered and often deliberately disorderly. The first full-length study of the Irish female  coming of age story, the book develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology, derived from the belated oedipalization of Joyce's bildungsheld, to read these stories. This study argues that all Irish maturation stories are shaped by the uneven and belated maturation story  of the Irish republic itself, which took as its avatar the Irish woman,  whose citizenship in that republic was unrealized, as indeed was her citizenship in an Irish republic of letters. Dougherty takes the writing  of Irish women as seriously as other critics have taken Joyce's work. Discusses texts by James Joyce, John McGahern, Hannah Lynch, Kate O'Brien, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Mary Colum, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Dervla Murphy, Clare Boylan, Nuala O'Faolain, Eavan Boland, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Eimear McBride, Éilís ní Dhuibhne, Melatu Uche Okorie, and Soula Emmanuel Examines the form, narration, and content of fictional, non-fictional, and national narratives Develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology Synthesizes historical, sociojuridical, feminist, post-colonial, and literary historical narratives of Irish development Jane Elizabeth Dougherty is Professor in the School of Literature, Writing and Digital Humanities and affiliate faculty in the School of Africana and Multicultural Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications (IAP, 2024) explores the lived experiences of six women, including the author herself, with physical disabilities in China. The book provides in-depth descriptions of each woman's experiences in different aspects and analyze the commonalities and differences in their experiences through their life courses. The book explores answers to some of these questions: How do physically disabled women make sense of their experiences? What are some of the empowering and/or disempowering moments/events in their lives, if any? What are disabled women's experiences in terms of education, employment, relationships, family life, and social activism? How does some of the disabled women in the book become motivated and mobilized to work on disability issues? This book serves to amplify Chinese disabled women's stories and make their presence more visible. Too often, dominant narratives and depictions of disability are written by people without disabilities, while disabled people's voices are either invisible or secondary. Sadly, this phenomenon is not new and disability advocates have been faced with these types of narratives for quite some years. To have one's own voice and speak up is to claim subjectivity, agency, and power. Different stories told by women with disabilities themselves can enrich our understanding of disability and gender. These stories have the potential to challenge dominant and oppressive narratives prevalent in our ableist societies. The stories included in this book could provide space and potential to connect with disabled people (people with either visible or invisible disabilities) elsewhere. Women's empowering experiences and encounters shown in this book could inspire relevant stakeholders to think of ways to better understand and support disabled women in their environments. This book will have wide implications for readers not only in China, but also in other parts of the world. Many disability stories of exclusion and/or empowerment of the world are still hidden and not reflected upon. The author invites readers to reflect on their own experiences and how societies have impacted the life courses of individuals with or without disabilities in their respective social, political, economic, and cultural environments. Cultural and social change around disability can start with anyone who are touched by genuine stories of vulnerability and reflexivity, as the ones to be shared in this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies