New Books in Gender

Equality between the sexes has long been recognized as a fundamental moral and legal objective of the UN, and more recently of many governments and international financial and development institutions. Women's empowerment has long been recognized as essential to the larger development objectives of the UN and the international community. Extensive empirical data from all over the world today informs and supports the thesis that countries and regions just do better when women are educated, formally employed legally secure and politically well represented. In this episode of International Horizons, Ellen Chesler talks with Latanya Mapp Frett about the effects that investment in women led initiatives have for the world. Mapp Frett is the author of The Everyday Feminist: The Key to Sustainable Social Impact Driving Movements We Need Now More Than Ever (Wiley, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In 2005, after considerable campaigning by women’s groups, the Indian government brought in an important new law, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA). A civil law, the PWDVA was meant to combat violence against women in familial and intimate spaces. In The Violent Domestic Law: Its Practice and Strategies of Survival (Zubaan Academic, 2022), the authors ask: how effective has this law been? Have there been any changes in institutional regimes and their politics as a result of this legislation? They look at seven districts of West Bengal and interrogate, through the testimonies of survivors, whether the law reshapes the domestic, or whether the embeddedness of violence in the domestic is so complete that change through law must necessarily be partial and imperfect. Importantly, the questions the authors ask go beyond the heteronormative approach that centres only the married woman in the discourse around domestic violence. They include the voices of lesbian and transgender women, as well as women with physical and psycho-social disabilities. Given these unique insights, The Violent Domestic will be a welcome addition to legal and gender studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Peak TV’s Unapologetic Jewish Woman: Exploring Jewish Female Representation in Contemporary Television Comedy (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Pickette analyzes the ways in which contemporary American television is establishing a new version of the Jewish woman and a new take on American Jewish female identity that challenges the stereotypes of Jewish femininity proliferated on television since its inception. Using case studies of streaming, cable, and network comedy series from the past decade written and created by Jewish women, including Broad City, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, among others, this book illustrates how this new Jewish woman has been given voice and agency by the bevy of Jewish female showrunners interested in telling stories about Jewish women for wider audiences.Samantha Pickette is assistant professor of Instruction in Jewish Studies and the assistant director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop. Now, poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination--its history, its meaning and its cultural significance--told through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge on its shores. Together, figures as divergent as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith and Jeremy O. Harris tell the story of a queer space in constant evolution. Transporting, impeccably researched and gorgeously written, Fire Island (Hanover Square Press, 2022) is the definitive book on an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history.Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In 1949, women from across the world traveled to Beijing for the Asian Women’s Conference to discuss how to combat the dual threats of colonial rule and a new post-war global imperialism. These activists developed a groundbreaking political strategy, which assigned different roles to women living in colonial nations and those still colonized, arguing that both had a part to place in creating a more just global peace. In Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949 (University of California Press, 2023), Elisabeth Armstrong looks more closely at the lives of the women who attended the conference. Their backgrounds in anticolonial struggles helped shape the work of the umbrella organization—the Women’s International Democratic Federation—that supported the convening. The book profiles a range of women from Indonesia, Vietnam, the United States, France, India, Iraq, and China among others, who had been involved in armed revolution, antifascist resistance, and leftist party politics worldwide. In the preparations and travel that led to the conference they butted heads, but also built lasting friendships with each other through their activism. Their collective efforts helped create a framework for internationalist solidarity for women’s emancipation in a world structured through militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the seeming impossibility of justice.Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India (Duke UP, 2022), Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape reclaim their autonomy by refusing to see themselves as defined entirely by the act of violation. Oza also shows how rape cases become arenas where bureaucrats, village council members, caste communities, and the police debate women’s sexual subjectivities and how those varied understandings impact the status and reputations of individuals and groups. In this way, rape gains meaning beyond the level of the survivor and victim to create a social category. By tracing the shifting meanings of sexual violence and justice, Oza offers insights into the social significance of rape in India and beyond.Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out her upcoming books: The Other #MeToos and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir. Follow her on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? In Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race (Verso, 2023), Sita Balani argues that the trickery of race comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and essential: sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race.Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion (Duke UP, 2019), for all their conceptual power in implicating humans in ecologically damaging practices, these theories can undermine scope for political action. Drawing inspiration from activist projects between the 1980s and the present that range from anticapitalist media experiments and vegan food activism to social media campaigns against animal research, Giraud explores possibilities for action while fleshing out the tensions between theory and practice. Rather than an activist ethics based solely on relationality and entanglement, Giraud calls for what she describes as an ethics of exclusion, which would attend to the entities, practices, and ways of being that are foreclosed when other entangled realities are realized. Such an ethics of exclusion emphasizes foreclosures in the context of human entanglement in order to foster the conditions for people to create meaningful political change.Dr Eva Haifa Giraud (@evahaifa_) is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media & Society in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield. Her latest book is Veganism: Politics, Practice and Theory(Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages critical narratives of displacement and migration to examine the formation of religious communities. A central theme of this book is the idea of an Isma‘ili ethics of care, as Khoja-Moolji documents with meticulous care the powerful manifestations and consequences of everyday life connected with practices ranging from cooking, socio-religious counseling, and story telling. Moving nimbly between different locations including East Africa, South Asia, and North America, as well as varied theoretical registers dealing with categories of sacred space, the sensorium, and embodied sociality, Rebuilding Community is a delightful text that will interest scholars in multiple fields across the Humanities.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

What is the history and future of feminism? In Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political (Lawrence Wishart, 2023), Jo Littler, Professor of Social Analysis and Cultural Politics at City, University of London, collects almost a decade of interviews with key thinkers in contemporary feminism. United by a shared left feminist perspective, interviewees including Nancy Fraser, Akwugo Emejulu, Sheila Rowbotham, Hilary Wainwright, Wendy Brown and Angela McRobbie, reflect on their work and thought in conversations that cover politics and praxis as much as theoretical interventions and academic work. The book also engages with earlier career feminists, such as Finn Mackay and Sophia Siddiqui, alongside those focused on feminism in the global south, such as Veronica Gago. Showing the breadth of left feminism, as well as the themes and ideas that unite a genuinely diverse range of interviewees, the book is essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the key issue of gender in contemporary society.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies