New Books in Gender Studies

When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harassment in schools. Title IX is the civil rights law that prohibits education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” At the time, however, the term “sexual harassment” was not yet in use; this kind of misconduct was simply accepted as part of life for girls and women at schools and universities. In Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX (Princeton UP, 2025), Celene Reynolds shows how the women claiming protection under Title IX made sexual harassment into a form of sex discrimination barred by the law. Working together, feminist students and lawyers fundamentally changed the right to equal opportunity in education and schools' obligations to ensure it. Drawing on meticulously documented case studies, Reynolds explains how Title IX was applied to sexual harassment, linking the actions of feminists at Cornell, Yale, and Berkeley. Through analyses of key lawsuits and an original dataset of federal Title IX complaints, she traces the evolution of sexual harassment policy in education—from the early applications at elite universities to the growing sexual harassment bureaucracies on campuses today—and how the work of these feminists has forever shaped the law, university governance, and gender relations on campus. Reynolds argues that our political and interpretive struggle over this application of Title IX is far from finished. Her account illuminates this ongoing effort, as well as the more general process by which citizens can transform not only the laws that govern us, but also the very meaning of equality under American law. New Books in Women's History Podcast Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College, website here @janescimeca.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

Disco didn't just happen—it emerged from the vibrant gay club scene of 1970s New York City. In this episode, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares explore how iconic venues like the Continental Baths, the Mineshaft sex club, and the legendary Paradise Garage became part of a musical revolution that transformed popular culture. Joining them is Lucas Hilderbrand, Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of the groundbreaking book The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After (Duke University Press, 2023). Together, they trace the fascinating connections between New York's underground gay scene and the rise of legendary DJs like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles, while uncovering how these same spaces launched the careers of mainstream superstars, including Bette Midler and Barry Manilow. From intimate bathhouses to pulsing dance floors, discover how gay culture didn't just influence disco—it created it. The conversation also touches on Hilderbrand's companion archival project, The Bars Are Archived: Primary Sources for Gay Bars in America, which is available through Alexander Street's Queer Pasts collection. 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 personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Dr. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace. 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

Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks. Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of the media, researchers and governments alike, discussions tend to either over-sensationalize the community or offer simplistic explanations for their existence. This book uses a mixture of historical and economic analysis, alongside actual Manosphere content, to delve deeper. With The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online (Polity, 2025), Simon James Copland explains how the Manosphere has developed and why it appeals to so many men. He argues that the Manosphere is not an aberration, but is deeply embedded within mainstream, neoliberal, social structures. For a cohort of alienated men, the promise of community provides a space of understanding, connection and purpose. This insightful book dares to dig into the corners of incel communities and online spaces where misogyny thrives. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand, and do something about, this growing and worrying phenomenon. Simon Copland is Honorary Fellow at the Australian National University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel 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 the fifth episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares sit down with the legendary DJ Nicky Siano. The history of dance music in 1970s New York is synonymous with the life and work of Siano. He was among the early attendees of David Mancuso's Loft dances, where he learned to organize parties and DJ for an audience. Siano transposed Mancuso's informal gatherings to a proper discotheque called The Gallery (1972-1977,) which he co-owned and DJed. At The Gallery, Siano pioneered techniques such as beatmatching, EQing, and using three turntables to fashion a proto-disco sound through his preferred selection of funky soul and R&B records, inspiring a host of celebrated figures like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles. The Gallery was a seminal 1970s nightclub that laid a blueprint for iconic New York clubs like the Paradise Garage and Studio 54. Siano is perhaps most well-known for DJing and being fired from Studio 54 for his unconventional methods. For Siano, music was more than pleasure. It was a source of empowerment, a refuge, and spiritual salve that has enabled him to persevere and thrive as a DJ in New York during the Seventies and beyond. In this conversation, Siano illustrates the power of music that animated his involvement as an activist in the Stonewall riots. As a DJ, Siano has maintained his belief in the capacity of music to bring people together, despite social differences, and as a healing force during the AIDs era. In this conversation, Siano traces his evolving romance with music, echoing his enduring salvo: Love is the Message. The title of this episode draws from a memoir that Nicky Siano is currently authoring, I, DJ: Stonewall to Studio 54. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Averill Earls is an associate professor in history at St. Olaf's College and her research focuses on sexuality and modern Ireland. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Historical Reflections (in the top-visited issue of the journal to date), Perspectives Magazine, Nursing Clio, and Notches Blog. In 2021 she was awarded the Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize for her 2020 article, "Solicitor Brown and His Boy." Prof. Earls is also one of the four feminist historians and award-winning podcasters who founded Dig: A History Podcast in 2017. Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972 (Temple UP, 2025) tells the unexpected, sometimes heartbreaking, stories of Dublin's men who desired men and the Gardaí who policed them. The book uncovers Ireland's queer lives of the past. Averill Earls investigates how same-sex-desiring men lived and loved in a country where their sexuality was illegal and seen as unnatural. Across seven social biographical chapters, each highlighting individuals at the nexus of these histories, Earls constructs a narrative of experiences through the larger contexts in which they are embedded. She uses courtroom testimonies, police records, and family history archives as well as “educated speculation” to show how structures governing male same-sex desire in Ireland played out on the bodies of the men who desired men, the teen boys who sold sex to men, and the way the Catholic-nationalist ethos shaped the Gardaí who policed them. Love in the Lav examines the experiences of people such as cabbie James Hand, who was put on trial for gross indecency, to provide a window into the queer working-class subculture of 1930s Dublin. Earls also focuses on issues of consent, especially with teens, and the unregulated queer Irish world of public figures, including Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, Ronald Brown, and John Broderick. By examining twentieth-century Ireland through the lived experiences of ordinary same-sex-desiring Irish men who were relegated to obscurity by Irish society, Earls reveals the contradictions, possibilities, and magnitude of postcolonial Irish Catholic nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; to Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; to Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astounding female and gender-nonconforming artists wrestled snakes, performed magic tricks with electricity, and walked across waterfalls on tightropes, shattering taboos by performing in public. Betsy deftly explores how major forces in the long nineteenth century combined to create the uniquely American spectacle of the traveling circus. During the transformation of the circus from scrappy “mud shows” to a major international business, these extraordinary women challenged contemporary ideas of femininity, creating new possibilities for women far beyond the big top. Our guest is: Betsy Golden Kellem, who is a scholar of the unusual. She has served on the boards of the Barnum Museum and the Circus Historical Society, is the Emmy-winning host and writer of the Showman's Shorts video series on P.T. Barnum, and writes for JSTOR Daily. An expert media and intellectual property attorney, she has taught at Yale and the University of Connecticut, and regularly speaks on the weirder corners of history and law. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a dissertation and writing coach, and a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Women's History playlist for listeners: The World She Edited Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials We Refuse Tomboy Dear Miss Perkins The Lost Journals of Sacajewea The Untold Life of Julia Chinn Smithsonian American Women Share And Share Alike The House on Henry Street Speaking While Female Sophonisba Breckinridge Remembering Lucille Never Caught 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 275+ 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

Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025) introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about fat people, their lives, and choices. Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order to understand this field, the book also explores its intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, migration and beyond. In addition to thinking through terminology and history, this book will aim to unpack three key myths which often guide Fat Studies, showing that: fat is a meaningful site of oppression intersected with other forms of discrimination and hatred to be fat is not a choice (but also that a discussion of choice is itself problematic); and fat cannot be unambiguously correlated with a lack of health Fat Studies: The Basics is a lively and accessible foundation for students of Gender Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Media Studies, as well as anyone interested in learning more about this emergent field. May Friedman is a Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. 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 episode, New Books Network Host Nina Bo Wagner speaks with Karen Bartlett about The Escape From Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance (The New Press and Duckworth, 2025). The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges, and set out to transform their country. Their work, however, posed an existential threat to everything the Taliban believed in. When the United States withdrew in August 2021, the women judges of Afghanistan faced mortal danger. Journalist Karen Bartlett goes beyond their escape, and talks about the Afghan women judges' backgrounds, the cases they were tie breakers on, and the importance of the international network of women judges who helped them evacuate in 2021. Bartlett critiques the abandonment of Afghanistan by the West, and warns people not to normalise or be complacent to the Taliban regime which is still strongly opposed within the country. She also calls for the international community to take accountability for women judges who are still left in limbo or trapped in Afghanistan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political objectives. In the early 1800s, when the slim fit of neoclassical dresses made interior pockets impractical, upper-class women began to carry small purses called reticules, which provided them with a private place in a world where they did not have equal access to public space. Although many items of apparel have long expressed their wearer's aspirations, only the purse has offered carriers privacy, pride, and pleasure. This privacy has been particularly important for those who have faced discrimination because of their gender, class, race, citizenship, or sexuality. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality. Kathleen Casey closely examines a variety of sources--from vintage purses found in abandoned buildings and museum collections to advertisements, photograph albums, trade journals, newspaper columns, and trial transcripts. She finds purses in use at fraught historical moments, where they served strategic and symbolic functions for their users. The result is a thorough and surprising examination of an object that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used to influence social, cultural, economic, and political change. Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. Caleb Zakarin is editor of 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

Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Inequality in the workplace impacts all areas of our lives, from health and self-development to economic security and family life. But, despite the world's richest countries' long-avowed commitments to gender equality, there is still so much to fix - and so much we don't see.With perceptive and razor-sharp insight, in Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality – and Why Men Still Win at Work (W.W. Norton, 2025) award-winning author Cordelia Fine reveals how the status quo - Patriarchy Inc. - is harming us all, in our working lives and beyond. Drawing on social and cultural history, examples from hunter-forager societies to high finance and the latest thinking in evolutionary science, she dismantles the existing, inadequate visions for gender equality and charts an inspiring path towards a fairer and freer society Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel 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 Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual 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

While Hollywood's images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz's ethnography follows reporters and paparazzi to examine their everyday practices of work and labor that bring celebrity images and stories into being on the pages of celebrity magazines. Grounded in media workers' perspectives and everyday life, this book carefully situates Latino paparazzi and women reporters in relationship to the particular vulnerabilities that they face. For example, Díaz traces a shift in the demographic of the paparazzi from white men to Latino men, and with it a significant shift in the tone of insults levied against them. Women reporters remain vulnerable to sexual harassment and other dangers in carrying out their work. Hollywood presents itself to its audience through its carefully crafted films, images, and stories. Díaz's work troubles this facade by centering the work and challenges of the everyday laborers who produce it. Vanessa Díaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

TransGenre (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a reconsideration of genre theory in long-form fiction through transgender minor literature in the US and Canada. Using four genre sites (the road novel, the mourning novel, the chosen family novel, and the archival novel), this Element considers how the minoritized becomes the minoritarian through deterritorializing generic conventions in fiction to its own ends. In so doing, TransGenre proposes narrative reading practices as strategies of the minor to subvert, transgress, and reappropriate the novel's genealogy and radical future prospects. A range of fiction published in the last decade is deployed as largely self-theorizing, generating its own epistemological, thematic, and formal innovations and possibilities, revealing cisheteronormative underpinnings of generic categories and turning them in on themselves. Aaron Hammes holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, and was most recently the Virginia and Walter Nord Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Hammes has published on sex work, transgender literature, and prison abolition in South Atlantic Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, the Routledge Handbook of Transgender Literature, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and GLQ. Their first monograph, TransGenre, (Cambridge, 2025) is an exploration of genre theory and contemporary transgender minor literature. Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

It is not Egypt's 2011 revolution that opened a space for women's and feminist activism, but—as Biography of a Revolution: The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt (U of California Press, 2025) shows—the long history of women's activism that created the intellectual and political background for revolution. By centering the experiences and ideas of multiple generations of women activists and intellectuals, Lucia Sorbera traces the feminist genealogies of Egypt's nationalist, student, Marxist, labor, human rights, and democratic social movements. Biography of a Revolution gathers a series of interrelated intimate and relational stories, charting in vivid detail the entanglements between women's aspirations across a century of politics and friendships. This historical analysis innovatively deploys decolonial and indigenous feminist epistemologies, bringing women's, gender, and feminist history into the center of Egypt's political, social, and intellectual history. More than a decade after the 2013 military coup, women's intellectual and political activism remains crucial to keeping the embers of revolution aglow. Lucia Sorbera is Associate Professor and Chair of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard?  Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South.  Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903.  Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particularly Maggie Lena Walker, who wouldn't take no for an answer as she built up a culture of business and entrepreneurship against incredibly long odds and never-ending efforts by regulators and competitors to thwart her efforts. It makes for gripping reading. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World (Indiana UP, 2024), is the result of a collaboration between two sociologists, Professor Shulamit Reinharz and Dr. Barbara Vinick. Both come from backgrounds deeply intertwined with Jewish history and feminism. Prof. Reinharz, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, became a rabbi's daughter after her father settled in the US. Her work often explores topics of Jewish tradition and women's roles. Dr. Vinick, also a sociologist, initially focused on gerontology but later collaborated with Reinharz on projects exploring Jewish women's experiences worldwide, she hopes this this book can be a respite from the troubles of the world. The book aims to reveal the diversity and depth of traditional and emerging Jewish communities globally, that many readers might not have considered. The editors collected stories from 83 countries on six continents. Each story is either written as a mini-biography or memoir, sometimes by the brides themselves. They made a conscious effort not to reject any stories, regardless of whether they depicted positive or negative experiences. The collection thus includes stories touching on forced marriages, abusive relationships, divorces, and difficult situations. The book is structured to highlight memorable and unique aspects of weddings, such as courtship traditions, betrothal ceremonies, conversions, and customs during wartime. There is a special focus on diversity, including emerging Jewish communities across Africa and Latin America. Among the highlighted stories is a mail-order bride in Mexico who, upon arrival, refused to return home despite not matching her suitor's expectations, eventually resulting in decades of marriage—a testament to the unpredictability and resilience found in these stories. Daisy Aboudi's family in Sudan, a now-extinct Jewish community which found marital partners across the Egyptian border, reveals how Jewish life adapts and persists.  The anthology covers weddings within various strands of Judaism, including a Chabad wedding in Thailand. The betrothal chapter explores customs whose significance has changed over time, including elaborate engagement ceremonies in places like Burma, Nicaragua, and India, where traditions include henna, turmeric, prayers, and communal exchanges. Ariela Tischler's story from Switzerland serves as a link between family heritage and Jewish law. Descended from Rabbi Moshe Isserlis, who decreed it permissible to marry on Lag BaOmer, Ariela and her husband wed on that day, echoing the family tradition established by her grandparents. Personal favorites among the editors' stories include Dr. Vinick's account of attending a group wedding in Madagascar following the conversion of local community members, demonstrating the intersection of ritual, adaptation, and communal joy. Professor Reinharz selected a contemporary Israeli bride, Yael Yafielli, whose feminist and renewal-minded approach prompted her to design a wedding ceremony more aligned with her beliefs and those of her secular partner, rather than conform to the Orthodox rabbinate's expectations. They hope to honor both those who have sustained Judaism in isolated regions and those rebuilding it anew, while also foregrounding Jewish women's voices and experiences. Ultimately, the project is a celebration of Jewish diversity, women's voices, continuity, and ongoing change. 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 major new history of Saudi Arabia, from its eighteenth-century origins to the present day Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam's two holiest cities. It is also one of the world's only absolute monarchies. How did Saudi Arabia get to where it is today? In Saudi Arabia: A Modern History (Yale UP, 2025), David Commins narrates the full history of Saudi Arabia from oasis emirate to present-day attempts to leap to a post-petroleum economy. Moving through the ages, Commins traces how the Saud dynasty's reliance on sectarianism, foreign expertise, and petroleum to stabilize power has unintentionally spawned secular and religious movements seeking accountability and justice. He incorporates the experiences of activists, women, religious minorities, Bedouin, and expatriate workers as the country transformed from subsistence agrarian life to urban consumer society. This is a perceptive portrait of Saudi Arabia's complex and evolving story—and a country that is all too easily misunderstood. David Commins is the Benjamin Rush Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of history at Dickinson College. He is the author of Islam in Saudi Arabia, The Gulf States, and The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Coptic Culture and Community: Daily Lives, Changing Times (American University in Cairo Press 2024) brings together fourteen contributions from global scholars all considering the theme of daily life and the Egyptian Coptic Christian minority community. The essays focus on ancient, late ancient, premodern, and contemporary questions about art and resistance, poverty and wealth, gender and ecclesiastical agency, dress and power, and much more. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Dr. Mariam Ayad is Associate Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. Lydia Bremer-McCollum teaches Religious Studies at Spelman College. 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 Theological Metaphors of Marx (Duke UP, 2024) by Enrique Dussel – A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Dussel shows that Marx unveils the theology of capitalism in his critique of commodity fetishization. Capitalism constitutes an idolatry of the commodity that undergirds the capitalist expropriation of labor. Dussel examines Marx's early writings on religion and fetishism and proceeds through what Dussel refers to as the four major drafts of Capital, ultimately situating Marx's philosophical, economic, ethical, and historical insights in relation to the theological problems of his time. Dussel notes a shift in Marx's underlying theological schema from a political critique of the state to an economic critique of the commodity fetish as the Devil, or anti-God, of modernity. Marx's thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel's historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx's critiques of political economy and politics. Enrique Dussel (1934–2023) was Emeritus Professor, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, and the author of many books, including Twenty Theses on Politics and Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, both also published by Duke University Press.Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is coauthor of Human Rights, Hegemony, and Utopia in Latin America.Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy and Latina/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel 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

How and why did public opinions about gay marriage shift? In his new book, The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture (New York University Press, 2018), Peter Hart-Brinson explores this question and more through public opinion data and interviews with two generations of Americans. By using these mixed methods of analysis, Hart-Brinson dissects generational change of attitudes toward gay marriage through interpretive, historical, and demographic analyses. This book contributes to the literature by building upon previous work and moving the discussion of generational change and attitudes forward. Concepts that are important for the book include differences between orientation and attraction, a difference in how the two generations Hart-Brinson interviewed speak about gay marriage. This book is accessible to a wide audience and will be of interest to family and public opinion scholars, as well as anyone interested in public attitudes or gay marriage specifically. This book would be a great addition to any graduate level course on families, as it gives a solid background of the history of the LGBTQ movement as well as attitudes shifts toward gay marriage. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. 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 War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism (Polity Press, 2023) by David Theo Goldberg discusses how “Critical Race Theory” is consuming conservative America. The mounting attacks on a once-obscure legal theory are upending public schooling, legislating censorship, driving elections, and cleaving communities. In this much-needed response, renowned scholar David Theo Goldberg cuts to the heart of the claims expressed in these attacks. He punctures the demonization of Critical Race Theory, uncovering who is orchestrating it, funding the assault, and eagerly distributing the message. The book richly illustrates the enduring nature of structural racism, even as a conservative insistence on colorblindness serves to silence the possibility of doing anything about it. Crucially, Goldberg exposes the political aims and effects of the vitriolic attacks. The upshot of CRT's targeting, he argues, has been to unleash racisms anew and to stymie any attempt to fight them, all with the aim of protecting white minority rule. David Theo Goldberg is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel 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

­A Glimpse of Ogoni Women's Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2025) with Mariam Olugbodi “Ogoni Women's Activism” is a democratic feminist movement, and a nonviolent struggle against oil spills and environmental destruction in the Niger-Delta Nigeria in the 90s. The Federation of Ogoni Women Activists (FOWA) emerges to charge forward the course of sovereignty for both humans and the Niger-Delta ecosystem. The nonviolent resistance of the Ogoni Women through prayer meetings, fasting, and singing for community mobilisation epitomises a "love in action" (Dube, 2025) strategy to identity negotiation in the face of dehumanisation. The book, Ogoni Women's Activism: The Transnational Struggle for Justice, is a voyage into the history of the Ogoni tribes of the Niger-Delta, their lives, their ordeals of racism in their home nation with highlights of experiences of African immigrant women, the racialised refugees abroad, who fled from their home nation to seek sovereignty. The book builds on contemporary frameworks and adopts interdisciplinary approaches to unveil the outstanding revolutionary efforts of the Ogoni women in the Niger-Delta. Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam's greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is assessesible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ (22) Olugbodi Mariam | LinkedIn, Mariam Olugbodi (0000-0001-5027-6644) - ORCID and User:Margob28 - Meta 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 authors and editors of a new edited volume, Gender Ideology and Pastoral Practice: A Handbook for Catholic Clergy, Counselors, and Ministerial Leaders, represent a tremendous knowledge and experience in theology, philosophy, history, and social politics, and apply it to help us sort how to think about and talk about the recent wave of transgenderism in society and especially among young people. Often clothed in terms of compassion and acceptance, transgender advocates encourage young people to make permanent surgical changes to their bodies, bodies that many will soon regret. So, how do we counsel them? Christianity is fundamentally committed to compassion and love (caritas, agape) and opposed to judgement (Mt. 7:1) yet also committed to truth. And true love does not mean letting young people make permanent mistakes that they do not fully understand—so it's a real pickle! We talk it over on Almost Good Catholics. This episode was recorded in the sede vacante moment between the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV. Also, this episode is intended to be the first of two, with a second one following up in the near future with an interview with a transgender advocate in the coming weeks. Here is the book available from En Route Media, and of course from Amazon as well. Here is the Person and Identity website, an invaluable resource for those sorting through the issue. Theresa Farnan's website. Robert Fastiggi's website. Susan Selner-Wright's website. And here's the website of the International Catholic Jurists Forum that we discussed. Here are some earlier episodes of AGC with Robert Fastiggi, the second one also about the transgender questions (and the first about Mariology): Robert Fastiggi on Almost Good Catholics, episode 7: Mother of All Nations: Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Assumption, and Coronation of Mary Robert Fastiggi and Deborah Savage on Almost Good Catholics, episode 100: Lived Experience and the Search for Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality Here is are earlier AGC episodes about the related themes of same-sex attraction from two perspectives, including the discussion with Fr. Jim Martin SJ we discussed in today's episode: Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You're Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics. Garrett Johnson on Almost Good Catholics, episode 42: Who Do You Think You Are? Thorny Questions about Sex, Identity, and Catholic Doctrine. 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 Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea that women are outside of war, through a trio of dramatic stories revealing women's transformative role in the American Civil War. We think of war as a man's world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief.  Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union's response was to classify fugitive black women as "soldiers' wives," regardless of whether they were married--offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war's aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were. Women's War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been--and continue to be--in all wars. Jerrad P. Pacatte is a doctoral candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, discussing his book The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States, which was published by the University of California Press in January 2025. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care. 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

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach's—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library. William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Camilla Fitzsimons teaches at Maynooth University and is the author of Community Education and Neoliberalism in 2017 as well as Repealed: Ireland's Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights in 2021 which won the American Conference for Irish Studies James S Donnelly Sr book award for History and Social Science – she talked to us in January 2022 about that book. In this interview, she discusses her new book Rethinking Feminism in Ireland Rethinking Feminism in Ireland offers a radical approach that sees feminism as a practical philosophy that seeks to combat all forms of oppression. Exploring a number of topics including political activism, the world of work, queer and trans-rights activism, gender-based violence, and reproductive rights, this open access book sets out a fresh approach to the future of feminism using case studies in Ireland to to illustrate global issues. Including interviews with 30 people involved in feminist activism in Ireland, this book uses Irish history and political developments to create a collaborative, collective feminist effort with a global outlook. Rethinking Feminism in Ireland articulates a vision for the future that encourages solidarity across lines of difference and that makes the case for a politically charged, praxis-oriented approach that refuses to strip feminism of its substance and potential to contribute to radical change. Rethinking Feminism in Ireland is published with Bloomsbury and is also available as a free open access e-book Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the ‘sexual revolution' in mid-twentieth century England. Rather than focusing on ‘Swinging London', the book reveals the transformations in social life that took place in school playgrounds, local cinemas, and suburban bedrooms. Based on over 300 personal testimonies, Teenage Intimacies traces the everyday experiences of teenage girls, illuminating how romance, sex and intimacy shaped their young lives. The book shows how sex became embedded in ideas about ‘growing up' and explores how heterosexuality influenced young women's social lives and vice versa. It offers new explanations of why sexual mores shifted in this period, revealing the pivotal role that young women played in changing sexual values, cultures and practices in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. 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 late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 2025), Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political. Through captivating case studies of "subversive" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred. Anthony M. Petro is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at University of Notre Dame (effective fall 2025). His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion, was a finalist for the Religion Newswriters Association's book award for nonfiction. An early chapter from this book also won the 2012 LGBTQ Religious History Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. In 2019-2020, Petro was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Clayton Jarrard is a graduate student at NYU's XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program. 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 Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women's movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality. In Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures--Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area--to Harvard, MIT, and other universities--to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women's movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers' comments about women in science thirty years later. Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world. Christa Kuljian grew up in the Boston area, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for the past thirty years. She is a science writer and the author of Sanctuary and Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, which was short listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Currently a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University, she is also a fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Medicine and Technology (CHSMT) in Philadelphia. Caleb Zakarin is editor of 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 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following: “The psychological toll of being a Black woman…can never be underestimated. There is a low value placed on Black women's psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level and yet we feel the need to struggle to change the condition of all Black women.” Almost 50 years later, we have a book that responds to this important group's felt need. Foluke Taylor's Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room, delivers an archive of Black feminisms that are leveraged to explore certain psychoanalytic truths. This ambitious trajectory is however delightfully embedded within a text that also includes the potential of musical accompaniment: she prompts us to tune into Billy Paul, Sault, Norman Connors and many other musicians. Read Taylor and turn up your speakers: let your senses rise and fall, clap and hum. The book depends in part on the author's personal reflections that in their tenderness, read, at least to my ear, as rather different from auto theory. Indeed, Taylor seems not to be embracing a tributary of critical theory through which she then allies herself. Rather there are aspects of her history that beautifully accompany and highlight what is a heart-rending treatise about the lay of the land traversed by Black women who seek to train to become clinicians and by Black women who come to lie on the couch, a terrain that can be unduly rough, distorting, dangerous. Chapter by chapter, Taylor is conducting a chorus of Black feminist thinkers, women with whom she works in ongoing movement to transform and trouble what subjugates and suffocates the lives of Black women. A clinician herself, she places a special emphasis on the practice of psychotherapy, demonstrating how it can participate in deadly, racist repetitions. The book has an interior design that reminds me of the way one might arrange furniture in a room, a living room as it were. There are bolded quotes, in the upper right hand corner perhaps or the bottom left, demanding attention. Sometimes the same quote is reproduced more than once in a chapter. These quotes are the equivalent of textual wall hangings that live on the page. They take on a physicality, almost like an ottoman by the reading chair, a place to stop and stay put, feet off the ground. I experienced them also as obstacles: I had to consider them in order to move forth. Taylor's voice is intimate and readers are assumed into a position, dropped into her mind at times mid-sentence: a thought is forming and we are there for its birth. She offers radical hospitality, breathing us into being. All who create life, she reminds us, must breathe for those they carry forth. This she also does. The voices of African feminists were new to me and reflective of her having left London for ten years to seek her origins in Africa, looking for her place in the world. This is where her sharing of her early life is put to powerful use as she wonders with bell hooks, with Hortense Spillers, hardly alone, yet alone, “where do I come from?” This question is one that belongs to all people whose lineages have been truncated by enslavement. Tracy D Morgan is the founding editor of New Books in Psychoanalysis, and works as a psychoanalyst in Rome, Italy and Brooklyn, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud's favorite translator and Melanie Klein's earliest and most loyal supporter. In her new book The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (Routledge, 2018), Marion Bower puts Joan Riviere herself, the woman and the psychoanalyst, in the spotlight. She shows how Riviere made use of the latest psychoanalytic ideas in a highly creative and original way, expressing herself with clarity and emotional depth in seminal works about the inner life of female sexuality and treatment impasses. She was able to draw from a lifetime of challenging and fruitful experiences. After a childhood rife with emotional neglect, she stepped into the rich ferment of the dying Victorian era and came in touch with major progressive forces of the time like the suffragettes and the Society for Psychical Research. As a dressmaker's apprentice, she was among the first wave of women entering the work force. When the shifting soil of her childhood proved unstable, she entered analysis with Ernest Jones and, after becoming an analyst, with Freud himself. This personal connection proved fortuitous to the newly formed British Psychoanalytic Society, as it provided a solid anchor against the dividing drift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Bower paints an intimate portrait of a woman with a stern and sometimes vitriolic public persona and a shy and fragile personality that was saved by her involvement in psychoanalysis. In her best moments she was able to bridge that gap in her psychoanalytic writing, revealing herself through her theoretical musings. Marion Bower has trained as a teacher, social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked for many years in the child mental health services, including the Tavistock Clinic, and has edited and co-edited four books on various applications of psychoanalysis. She is currently co-editing a book on sexual exploitation. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de. 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 financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class--once considered a de facto "white" category--over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations.Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Officially, women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a degree of equality unknown elsewhere in Allied countries at the time. However, long-standing norms of gendered behavior and stereotypes that cast women as morally weak, politically fallible, and sexually tempting meant that women in the army or living behind enemy lines were viewed with skepticism, seen as weak points easily exploited by the enemy. Concerned about sabotage, espionage, and ideological corruption, authorities categorized women who fraternized with the enemy—or who were suspected of doing so—as “socially dangerous,” a uniquely Soviet legal designation that exposed the accused to prosecution, imprisonment, and exile. Even without official sanction, women rumored to be involved with German occupiers were reviled, and treated accordingly, by their neighbors. By reading official reports against the grain and incorporating rare personal documents, Kazyulina provides a multifaceted study of the realities for non-Jewish Soviet women—in the army or resistance, or at home in occupied territories—during and after Nazi occupation. Guest: Regina Kazyulina (she/her), is the assistant director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a visiting assistant professor of history. She teaches in the Graduate Certificate Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research interests include everyday life under German occupation, the “Holocaust by Bullets,” and the gendered lived experiences of Soviet civilians. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman 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 Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic view of the relationship between sperm, health, and the intersecting politics of gender, race, and reproduction. Always insightful and often provocative, the essays in this unprecedented collection cover a broad range of issues related to male reproductive and sexual health—including the latest technological developments for creating sperm; the specter of eugenics in contemporary medical markets; emerging approaches to male contraceptive methods, male infertility, and trans healthcare; controversies surrounding sperm donors and sperm banking; disparities in sexual health education for teens—all the while attending to the enormous variation in how individuals and societies understand, embody, and experience sperm. At a time when the most basic rights of reproductive autonomy are under severe threat, contributors to this volume argue this is precisely the moment to rethink and reimagine sperm from a variety of medical, political, and cultural perspectives. Ultimately, this volume aims to contribute to a more reproductively just society and broaden conversations around bodies, health and equity in the United States. 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 about: escape rooms, the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities, and a study on belongingness in college and university. 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

Women have been central to the evolution of dance music culture since its earliest days, yet their contributions have often been overlooked. From Régine Zylberberg's pioneering work in creating the modern discotheque in 1950s Paris to Sharon White's trailblazing presence at New York's legendary venues in the 1970s, female DJs have shaped dance floors worldwide. Sharon White broke barriers as a Black queer radio DJ, finding her way into the booth at the Paradise Garage in 1975. She became the first female DJ to play at the revered Saint club and spun records at Studio 54. Her influence can be seen in later pioneers like London's Smokin' Jo, who emerged from the British acid house scene to become one of England's most celebrated DJs and the only woman to be awarded DJ of the Year in DJ Magazine's Top 100. In the second episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares welcome DJ, academic, and journalist Lulu Le Vay to explore the often-untold stories of women in dance music culture. Le Vay, who holds a PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths and performs as DJ Lulu Levan, represents a new generation of "PhDJs" combining academic inquiry with dance floor experience. From writing for publications like The Face, i-D, and The Guardian to spinning at festivals like Lovebox and Bestival, she documents club culture from multiple perspectives. Currently working on a documentary about women DJs with director Sonja Phillips, Le Vay is also part of Love Underground, a new collaboration with producer Tommy D whose new single "The Journey Part 1" is out on Chillifunk records. Through her podcast Where Love Lives and her work preserving dance music history, Le Vay continues celebrating the women who built the foundations of club culture. 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

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain. If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybyło contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place. 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 life gets hard, we turn to our female friends. Husbands, partners, and jobs come and go, but close friendships are our bedrock. Until they're not. What happens when these bonds sabotage instead of support? Who among us has the courage to walk away? And how can we protect ourselves from further heartbreak? In Estranged: How Strained Female Friendships Are Mended Or Ended (Meridian Editions, 2025) Susan Shapiro Barash takes a deep dive into the complexities of female friendships. By peeling back the societal narrative that our friendships are meant to last forever, she uncovers a more nuanced reality: the closest bonds do falter. Through groundbreaking research and 150 interviews with women ranging in age from 20-80, Barash reveals an emerging trend - estrangement among female friends. Estranged is an eye-opening investigation/practical guide for women navigating murky waters of suboptimal friendships. The book sheds light on unspoken pain of estrangement - both for the "estranger" who walks away and the "estrangee" who is left behind. Amid candid confessions of betrayal and grief, Barash challenges women to reimagine their friendships and take the bold step of letting go when necessary. This cutting-edge book offers an empowering path forward: learning to prioritize self-worth, stability and authenticity over loyalty to friendships that no longer serve us. Susan Shapiro Barash has written more than a dozen nonfiction books including Tripping the Prom Queen, Toxic Friends and You're Grounded Forever, but First Let's Go Shopping. For more than 20 years she taught gender studies and Marymount Manhattan College and has guest taught creative nonfiction at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction is published under her pen name, Susannah Marren. Deidre Tyler, PhD - Sociologist, Instructional Technologist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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