New Books in Gender

Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (U California Press, 2023), Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Associate Professor of American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also a core faculty member for the Arab and Muslim American Studies program. You can find her on Twitter: @ckaremalbrechtNajwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Postscript invites scholars to react to contemporary political events and today’s podcast welcomes an expert on domestic violence and firearms law to analyze a controversial Second Amendment case that the United States Supreme Court will hear this Fall, United States v. Rahimi. Kelly Roskam, JD is the Director of Law and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. She studies the constitutional implications of, advocates for, and works to improve the implementation of firearms laws. She has been writing about the practical implications of the Rahimi case since it came up through the 5th circuit (for example, “The Fifth Circuit’s Rahimi decision protects abusers’ access to guns. The Supreme Court must act to protect survivors of domestic violence” and “A Texas Judge Is Using Originalism to Justify Arming Domestic Abusers” (co-authored with Spencer Cantrell and Natalie Nanasi).In the podcast, we discuss the specifics of this strange case (a man who assaulted a woman, shot in the air, and later threatened to kill her claims that his constitutional rights have been violated – and the 5th circuit agrees that Congress is the threat to liberty). Ms. Roskam explains how the legal regime Congress created in 1994 to protect survivors of intimate violence also protects the safety of the public at large. She presents some of the data (e.g., that the presence of a firearm increases the likelihood that domestic violence will escalate into a homicide). She explains what is at stake, the possible ways the Supreme Court might approach the case, and ways to combat firearm violence beyond the courts.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

This book tells the untold story of the Married Women's Association. Unlike more conventional histories of family law, which focus on legal actors, it highlights the little-known yet indispensable work of a dedicated group of life-long activists.Formed in 1938, the Married Women's Association took reform of family property law as its chief focus. The name is deceptively innocuous, suggesting tea parties and charity fundraisers, but in fact the MWA was often involved in dramatic confrontations with politicians, civil servants, and Law Commissioners. The Association boasted powerful public figures, including MP Edith Summerskill, authors Vera Brittain and Dora Russell, and barrister Helena Normanton. They campaigned on matters that are still being debated in family law today.Sharon Thompson's Quiet Revolutionaries: The Married Women's Association and Family Law (Hart Publishing, 2022) sheds new light upon legal reform then and now by challenging longstanding assumptions, showing that piecemeal legislation can be an effective stepping stone to comprehensive reform and highlighting how unsuccessful bills, though often now forgotten, can still be important triggers for change. Drawing upon interviews with members' friends and family, and thousands of archival documents, the book is compulsory reading for lawyers, legal historians, and anyone who wishes to explore histories of law reform from the ground up.Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab (Oxford UP, 2022), Falguni Sheth explores the multiple ways that liberalism is understood and exploited, and liberalism’s origin as a project of British colonialism and as a legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. The “unruly women” in the author’s title are, in liberalism, women who do not conform or who are not “suitably feminist”—like Muslim women who veil or Black women who, really, simply exist. Falguni argues that certain key terms, such as professionalism, dismissiveness, excruciation, ontopolitics, and address are crucial to our understanding of the ways that women of color are treated in legal cases and in the broader culture as well as our understanding of the psychic violence that liberalism and colonialism perpetuate on women of color.In our interview today, we discuss liberalism as a problem in theory, too, and not just in practice and its connections to the prejudice and discrimination faced by different groups of women of color. We also talk about the ways that feminism is defined by liberal and radical western feminists, the limitations of such understandings; specific supreme court and other legal cases involving discrimination against Muslim women; and the author explains the significance of political theory, liberal feminist theory, and theories of power to her arguments in the book overall.Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

This field-defining collection establishes unfinished film projects--abandoned, interrupted, lost, or open-ended--as rich and under-appreciated resources for feminist film and media studies. In deeply researched and creatively conceived chapters, scholars join with film practitioners in approaching the unfinished film as an ideal site for revealing the lived experiences, practical conditions, and institutional realities of women's film production across historical periods and national borders. Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon's Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (U California Press, 2023) recovers projects and practices marginalized in film industries and scholarship alike, while also showing how feminist filmmakers have cultivated incompletion as an aesthetic strategy. Objects of loss and of possibility, incomplete films raise profound historiographical and ethical questions about the always unfinished project of film history, film spectatorship, and film studies.Host Annie Berke sits down with editors Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon to ask how this project originated, what makes a film "incomplete," and what unfinished work has to tell us about the nature of cinema and art.Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Womens' Reproductive Choices (Utah State University Press, 2023) examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa.Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood. Childfree and Happy theorizes how affect and rhetoric work together to circulate reproductive doxa by using Sara Ahmed’s theories of gendered happiness scripts to analyze what reproductive doxa is embedded in those scripts and how they influence rhetoric by, about, and around childfree women.Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, including family members, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals, Childfree and Happy also explores how communities that make space for alternative happiness scripts form between childfree women and those who support them. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of the rhetoric of motherhood/mothering, as well as feminist rhetorical studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) examines the competing versions of manhood at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918. Students often arrived at Carlisle already engrained with Indigenous ideals of masculinity. On many occasions these ideals would come into conflict with the models of manhood created by the school’s original superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt believed that Native Americans required the “embrace of civilization,” and he emphasized the qualities of self-control, Christian ethics, and retaliatory masculinity. He encouraged sportsmanship and fair play over victory.Pratt’s successors, however, adopted a different approach, and victory was enshrined as the main objective of Carlisle sports. As major stars like Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima came to the fore, this change in approach created a conflict over manhood within the school: should the competitive athletic model be promoted, or should Carlisle focus on the more self-controlled, Christian ideal as promoted by the school’s Young Men’s Christian Association? The answer came from the 1914 congressional investigation of Carlisle. After this grueling investigation, Carlisle’s model of manhood starkly reverted to the form of the Pratt years, and by the time the school closed in 1918, the school’s standards of masculinity had come full circle.Bennett Koerber is a senior research associate at Taylor Research Group. He can be reached at bennettkoerber@taylorresearchgroup.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves?In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (Routledge, 2018), Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality, drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disrupts the gendered dynamics of household work.Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging (Berghahn Books, 2022) provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning.Rahil Roodsaz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Melissa Shew and Kimberly Garchar's book Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought (Oxford UP, 2020) empowers its readers by exploring enduring, challenging, and timely philosophical issues in new essays written by expert women philosophers. The book will inspire and entice these philosophers' younger counterparts, curious readers of all genders, and all who support equity in philosophy.If asked to envision a philosopher, people might imagine a bearded man, probably Greek, perhaps in a toga, pontificating about abstract ideas. Or they might think of that same man in the Enlightenment, gripping a quill pen and pouring universal truths onto a page. They may even call to mind a much more modern man, wearing a black sweater and smoking a cigarette in a Paris café, expressing existential angst in a new novel or essay.What people are unlikely to picture, though, is a woman. Women have historically been excluded from the discipline of philosophy and remain largely marginalized in contemporary textbooks and anthologies. The under-representation of women in secondary and post-secondary curricula makes it harder for young women to see themselves as future philosophers. In fact, it makes it harder for all people to engage the valuable contributions that women have made and continue to make to intellectual thought. While some progress has been made in building a more inclusive world of philosophy, especially in the last fifty years, important work remains to be done.Philosophy for Girls helps correct the pervasive and problematic omission of women from philosophy. Divided into four sections that connect to major, primary fields in philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, and ethics), this anthology is unique: chapters are all written by women, and each chapter opens with an anecdote about a girl or woman from mythology, history, art, literature, or science to introduce chapter topics. Further, nearly all primary and secondary sources used in the chapters are written by women philosophers. The book is written in a rigorous, academic spirit but in lively and engaging prose, making serious philosophical insights accessible to readers who are new to philosophy.This book appeals to a wide audience. Individual readers will find value in these pages--especially girls and women ages 16-24, as well as university and high school educators and students who want a change from standard anthologies that include few or no women. The book's contributors both represent and map the diverse landscape of philosophy, highlighting its engagement with themes of gender and equity. In doing so, they encourage philosophers current and future philosophers to explore new territory and further develop the topography of the field.Philosophy for Girls is a rigorous yet accessible entry-point to philosophical contemplation designed to inspire a new generation of philosophers.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies