New Books In Gender Studies

Sandie Holguín (Professor of History and Coeditor of the Journal of Women’s History, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Rebecca Ingram (Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures, University of San Diego) about her book, Women’s Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). Today Spain is widely known for its culinary achievements, drawing tourists from around the world to sample delights from Michelin-starred restaurants. But in the early twentieth century, visitors to Spain complained unceasingly about the poor, primitive qualities of Spanish food and its preparation. To Spanish intellectuals, this denigrated place of Spanish food within the European pantheon of “civilized” cuisines seemed misplaced, and they set about to correct this mischaracterization. It is during this period of Spain’s great imperial losses and uneven economic modernization that Ingram enters to analyze the place of culinary writing in Spain’s moderni

This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics, constructions, positioning and logics. Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations (Routledge, 2022) builds upon Hall and Hearn's previous work, Revenge Pornography, but has been substantially reworked to examine other forms of DGSV such as upskirting and sexual deepfakes, as well as the latest research and debates in the field. Facilitated by developments in internet and mobile technologies, the non-consensual posting of real or fake sexually explicit images of others for revenge, entertainment, homosocial status or political leverage has become a global phenomenon. Using discourse and thematic analytical approaches, this text examines digital, survey and interview data on gendered sexual violences, abuses, and violations. The words of both the perpetrators and victim-survivors are pre

Ying-chen Peng’s Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making is a beautiful new volume on late Qing imperial art practice from Yale University Press (forthcoming in 2023). Peng’s book, rigorously researched and richly illustrated, presents a revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager through an analysis of her patronage and participation in making art. Each chapter follows Cixi’s her “artfully subversive” command of various media forms, from photography and portraiture, to architecture, porcelain, painting, and calligraphy. Considering Cixi as a patron and artist in her own right, Peng frames the regent as a canny political and aesthetic strategist who worked within and against conventions that circumscribed female power to craft an assertive role as the face of the Great Qing Empire at a moment of immense historical changes. Join us for a fascinating discussion of the artistic universe crafted by Cixi. Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio S

Beverley Chalmers's book Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust (Grosvenor House, 2020) exposes a taboo aspect of Holocaust history; the sexual abuse of children. Children were sexually assaulted in ghettos, camps, on transit trains, while in hiding, and even when sent to supposed safety outside Europe. The Nazi’s genocidal brutality facilitated the abuse of children, in addition to targeting them for murder. In addition, children were sexually assaulted by some rescuers and peers who took advantage of their vulnerability. After the war, they were again betrayed by those who discounted their experiences, and by Holocaust scholars who refuse to acknowledge their stories or give credence to their memories. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner 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

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, S

The first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949) (Brill, 2020) , authored by Amanda Wangwright, recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten force in China's modern art world. Through its detailed examination of the lives and careers of six female artists—Guan Zilan, Qiu Ti, Pan Yuliang, Fang Junbi, Yu Feng, and Liang Baibo—this book argues that women were central to the emergence of modernist art in early twentieth-century China and to the nation’s larger modernization project. Amanda S. Wangwright’s analysis of a wealth of primary sources demonstrates how these women constructed public personas, negotiated space within art societies, applied feminist thought to their artistic praxis, and surmounted obstacles to their careers—wielding art as the “golden key” to professional advancement and gender equality. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interest

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future. Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that

Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst of her public breakdown, she managed to record an album, Blackout. Critics thought it spelled the end for Britney Spears' career. But Blackout turned out to be one of the most influential albums of the aughts. It not only brought glitchy digital noise and dubstep into the Top 40, but also transformed Britney into a new kind of pop star, one who shrugged off mainstream ubiquity for the devotion of smaller groups of fans who worshipped her idiosyncratic sound. Britney Spears’s Blackout (Bloomsbury, 2022) returns to the grimy clubs and paparazzi hangouts of LA in the 2000s as well as the blogs and forums of the early internet to show how Blackout was a crucial hinge between twentieth and twenty-first-century pop. Natasha Lasky is a writer and filmmaker living in Chicago, USA. Natasha on Instagram. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and

Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration (U Texas Press, 2022), documents a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is global in character, motivated by foreign affairs and international economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its cross-border analog. Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to fight the US-instigated “war on drugs" or else leave their fields to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes discovers that migrants' experiences dramatically alter their conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of masculinity an

Inna Perheentupa's book Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia: An Ethnography of Resistance and Resources (Policy Press, 2022) is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the politically turbulent 2010s. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the author illustrates how a new generation of activists chose feminism as their main political beacon, and how they negotiated the challenges of authoritarian and conservative trends. As we witness a backlash against feminism on a global scale with the rise of neoconservative governments, this highly relevant book decentres Western theory and concepts of feminism and social movements, offering significant insights into how resistance can mobilize and invent creative tactics to cope with an increasingly repressed space for independent political action. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU

Women played an essential role in the international struggle against fascism during the interwar period, though their work has been neglected in broader historiography. In Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism (Routledge, 2022), Jasmine Calver provides a comprehensive history of the Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (the International Committee of Women Against War and Fascism, or CMF), an international women's organization concerned with confronting the impact of fascism on women and children across the globe. Examining the CMF's key figures and campaigns during its short 1934-41 tenure, Calver reveals its place at the forefront of global debates about the threat posed by fascism and imperialism. This book explores how the professional women activists and the working-class women who populated the organization developed a committee which advocated for women on a global scale. CMF campaigns around the Spanish Civil War, rising Nazism in Germany, the Sino-Japanese War, and th

While the story of women’s liberation has often been framed by the growing acceptance of pants over the twentieth century, the most important and influential female fashions of the era featured skirts. Suffragists and soldiers marched in skirts; the heroines of the Civil Rights Movement took a stand in skirts. Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe revolutionized modern art and Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes in skirts. When NASA put a man on the moon, “the computer wore a skirt,” in the words of one of those computers, mathematician Katherine G. Johnson. As women made strides towards equality in the vote, the workforce, and the world at large, their wardrobes evolved with them. They did not need to "wear the pants" to be powerful or progressive; the dress itself became modern as designers like Mariano Fortuny, Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, and Diane von Furstenberg redefined femininity for a new era. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell's Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century (St. Martin's Press, 2022) l

Cathy McClive (Florida State University) offers the first full-length bilingual edition of an extraordinary treatise on childbirth written by a seventeenth-century French midwife in The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant (University of Toronto Press, 2022). In 1671, Marie Baudoin (1625-1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu of Clermont-Ferrand, sent a treatise on the art of childbirth to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant. The story of how Baudoin's knowledge and expertise as a midwife came to be expressed, recorded, and archived raises the question: Was Baudoin exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant's careful archival practices? Either way, Baudoin's treatise invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives "could be and do" in seventeenth-century France. Grounding Marie Baudoin's text in a microanalysis of her life, work, and the Jansenist network be

In Wandering Games (MIT Press, 2022), Melissa Kagen analyzes wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80

Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-De-Siècle Spain (Vanderbilt UP, 2021) argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the Church, secular doctors and intellectuals employed strikingly similar paradigms to those through which the early modern Spanish Church castigated female mysticism as demonic possession. Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism's subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. The only woman author studied here, Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism a

Today I talked to Chris McMorran about his new book Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022). Amid the decline of many of Japan’s rural communities, the hot springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot. Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan have enticed village youth to return home to take over successful family businesses and revive the community.  Chris McMorran spent nearly two decades researching ryokan in Kurokawa, including a full year of welcoming guests, carrying luggage, scrubbing baths, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and talking with co-workers and owners about their jobs, relationships, concerns, and aspirations. He presents the realities of ryokan work—celebrated, messy, ignored, exploitative, and liberating—and introduces the people who keep the inns running by making guests feel at home. McMorr

A man is arrested for a single typo, a woman gets on buses at random, and two friends reunite in a changed world.... Diverse in form, scope and style, Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022) brings together the voices of thirteen female Kazakhstani writers, to offer a glimpse into the many lives, stories, and histories of one of the largest countries to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union. The twenty-four stories in Amanat, translated into English from Kazakh and Russian, comprise a groundbreaking survey of women's writing in the Central Asian country over its thirty years of independence, paying homage to the rich but largely unrecorded oral storytelling tradition of the region. Contemplating nostalgia, politics, and intergenerational history in a time altered by modernity, Amanat acutely traces the uncertainties, struggles, joys, and losses of a corner of the post-Soviet world often unseen and overlooked. Utterly absorbing, Amanat is an invitation to listen-the women of Kazakhstan

Monica Juneja and Sumathi Ramaswamy's Motherland: Pushpamala N.'s 'Woman and Nation' (Roli Books, 2022) examines Motherland, an important series of photo-performances by the acclaimed artist Pushpamala N. on the Indian nation personified as woman, mother, and goddess. The series shows Pushpamala taking on Mother India's myriad personifications: nubile beauty and saintly renunciant; militant goddess wearing a garland of skulls or receiving the ultimate sacrifice of a warrior's head; the mother-surgeon activating the birth of model citizens; and destitute widow, bent from years of abject labor. As she does so, she reveals that nations are invented, as are national embodiments. The artist's burden is to reveal the ingredients of such inventions. Ujaan Ghosh is a graduate student at the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin, Madison Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Kwasi Konadu's book Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal's African Empire (Hurst, 2022) presents rare evidence about the lives of three African women in the sixteenth century--the very period from which we can trace the origins of global empires, slavery, capitalism, modern religious dogma and anti-Black violence. These features of today's world took shape as Portugal built a global empire on African gold and bodies. Forced labor was essential to the world economy of the Atlantic basin, and afflicted many African women and girls who were enslaved and manumitted, baptised and unconvinced. While some women liaised with European and mixed-race men along the West African coast, others, ordinary yet bold, pushed back against new forms of captivity, racial capitalism, religious orthodoxy and sexual violence, as if they were already self-governing. Many Black Women of this Fortress lays bare the insurgent ideas and actions of Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, charting h

In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row is the author of Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. A Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Professor Row serves as the co-chair of the Arts and Design and Humanities Imagine for the project "Dreaming up the Change Disability Makes" and leads the CLA Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop on “Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World.” Professor Row’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and a Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the