New Books in Gender

Richard Petts' Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers (Routledge, 2022) focuses on issues of family, work, and gender, with a focus on gender inequality. Women are disadvantaged in both paid and domestic work, due in large part to being primarily responsible for duties within the domestic sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities, making the issue of reducing gender inequality even more pressing.Fathers play an important role in contributing to, and perhaps reducing, gender inequality, but barriers to their involvement in family life have received less attention than detailing challenges that mothers face. If men were equally involved in all aspects of domestic life (i.e., were fully engaged dads), women's burdens would be reduced and perceptions of who is responsible for parenting may change, resulting in greater gender equality. The book focuses on the key issue of father involvement, seeking to understand why fathers are less involved at home than mothers despite an increased desire for fathers to be more engaged parents. This book utilizes recent national survey data, interviews with fathers, and insights from the author's personal experience as a father to identify current norms of fatherhood within the United States, barriers to father involvement, and strategies to overcome these barriers. Overall, this book argues that by establishing the expectation that fathers will be fully engaged dads as a cultural norm, and by providing structural opportunities for fathers to meet this cultural standard, greater gender equality can be achieved within the United States.The arguments presented in this book are valuable for scholars in the areas of family, work, and gender, policymakers and business leaders who seek to promote gender equality and work-family balance, and parents who are interested in achieving a more egalitarian division of labor within their own families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route; African-American women in search of freedom from slavery; Chinese sex-workers sold openly on the docks of San Francisco; Native American women brutally displaced by the unstoppable tide of white settlers - these were the women who settled the American West, whose stories until now have remained mostly untold. As the internationally bestselling historian Katie Hickman writes, "Myth and misunderstanding spring from the American frontier as readily as rye grass from sod, and--like the wiry grass-- seem as difficult to weed out and discard." But the true-life story of women's experiences in the Wild West is more gripping, heart-rending, and stirring than all the movies, novels, folk-legends, and ballads of popular imagination.Drawing on letters, diaries, and other extraordinary contemporary accounts, sifting through the legends and the myths, the laws and the treaties, Katie Hickman presents us with a cast of unforgettable women, all forced to draw on huge reserves of resilience and courage in the face of tumultuous change: the half Cree, Marguerite McLoughlin, the much-admired "First Lady" of Fort Vancouver; the Presbyterian missionary Narcissa Whitman, who in 1837 became the first white woman to make the overland journey west across the Rocky Mountains; Biddy Mason, the Mississippi slave who fought for her freedom through the courts of California; Olive Oatman, adopted by the Mohave, famous for her facial tattoos.This is the story of the women who participated in the greatest mass migration in American history, transforming their country in the process. Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West (Spiegel & Grau, 2022) is American history not as it was romanticized but as it was lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her (Duke UP, 2022) Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience of feminist women who are sci-fi fans. The book shows their commitments to being both feminists and part of the sci-fi community, even where they face hostility and gatekeeping, personal ambivalences, and the reality of sci-fi as a problematic genre. Adopting an intersectional perspective, the book shows how race, age, and gender all play a role in the way feminist women interpret some of the biggest sci-fi franchises, as well as how they think about iconic characters. Crucially the analysis foregrounds the agency of feminist women sci-fi fans, demonstrating how they are challenging and changing the genre and its fan community for the better. Theoretically and empirically rich and deep, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in fandom!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

It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and come with their own artefacts and subcultures.Peter Rehberg’s book Hipster Porn: Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine 'Butt' (Routledge, 2022) looks at one such source artefact and its fandom, using as its matter the pink-papered magazine Butt which gained a cult following among European gay men in the first decade of the 2000s. The book reconstructs an important chapter of recent gay and queer history in order to make sense of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years in the contemporary gay world.Peter Rehberg speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about pornography after porn, Butt‘s outsized influence and the ultimate failures of its politics, as well as queer theory’s urgent need to refocus on the realities of sex and sexuality.Peter Rehberg is a writer, critic, and curator. He holds a PhD in German Literature from New York University and has taught and researched at universities and institutes including Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, University of Bonn, The University of Texas at Austin, and The University of Illinois, Chicago. He has published two novels and a collection of short stories. He also writes regularly for German media. In his academic work, he focusses on queer theory, queer visual culture, and popular culture. He is also the head of collections and archives at Schwules Museum, Berlin.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings Institution, 2022).The statistics are stunning. Men have a 9% lower graduation rate from college. One in three men without a completed high school education are now out of the workforce. About 40% of births take place outside of marriage (up from 11% in 1970). And men are 50% more likely to die from Covid-19 than women after contracting the virus. The long and short of it, while also advocating for full, real opportunities for women, short shrift is often being given to the problems men face. Neither ignoring the problem (the liberal choice, often) or suggesting we turn-back-the-clock to the 1950s (the conservative choice, often) will suffice. In this episode, Richard Reeves dares to propose some real solutions regarding education reforms, workplace opportunities, and pro-childrearing roles for all dads, married or otherwise.Richard Reeves is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He’s the author of the 2017 book Dream Hoarders and is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Chingona: Owning Your Inner Badass for Healing and Justice (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Mexican American activist, scholar, and podcast host Alma Zaragoza-Petty helps us claim our inner chingona, a Spanish term for badass woman. For all the brown women the world has tried to conquer, badassery can be an asset, especially when we face personal and collective trauma. Working for change while preserving her spirit, a chingona repurposes her pain for the good of the world. She may even learn that she belongs to a long line of chingonas who came before her--unruly women who used their persevering energy to survive and thrive.As a first-generation Mexican American, Zaragoza-Petty narrates in riveting terms her own childhood, split between the rain-soaked beauty of her grandparents' home in Acapulco and a harsh new life as an immigrant family in Los Angeles. She describes the chingona spirit she began to claim within herself and leads us toward the courage required to speak up and speak out against oppressive systems. As we begin to own who we are as chingonas, we go back to where our memories lead, insist on telling our own stories, and see our scars as proof of healing.Liberating ourselves from the bondage of the patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonization that exists in our own bodies, we begin to see our way toward a more joyful future. This work won't be easy, Zaragoza-Petty reminds us. Imagining a just and healed world from the inside out will take dialing in to our chingona spirit. But by unleashing our inner badass, we join the righteous fight for dignity and justice for all.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Rebels, Scholars, Explorers: Women in Vertebrate Paleontology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), Professors Annalisa Berta and Susan Turner uncover the rich legacy of women in the field of vertebrate paleontology from the eighteenth century until today. Through a series of biographies arranged both chronologically and geographically, the book offers a most welcome historical overview of the diverse contributions made by women to the advancement of vertebrate paleontology. Traditional narratives of the history of paleontology are dominated by the figures of men, leaving behind the achievements of countless women, who worked, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as assistants, preparators, or illustrators. Rebels, Scholars, Explorers constitutes a powerful antidote to this distorted vision of history, introducing the reader to the many ways women have been navigating gender biases to advance the science of vertebrate paleontology. By uncovering the contributions of women, the book also reveals the critical role played by a diversity of specializations and professions (such as paleoart, collection management, and preparation) in the field of vertebrate paleontology. Overall, the book paints a holistic portrait of the field, making questions of equity and fair representation within it even more urgent.Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Not long ago, same-sex couples had to jump through endless hoops to make their relationships even close to legal. Happily, those days are over. But here's the rub: many gay and lesbian couples, accustomed to living off-grid, are so thrilled to have the benefits of marriage that they jump into it without fully considering the consequences.In Before I Do: A Legal Guide to Marriage, Gay and Otherwise (New Press, 2016), leading gay rights attorney Elizabeth F. Schwartz spells out the range of practical considerations any couple should address before tying the knot. She explains the rights married couples have--and those they do not. With cameos from some of the most prominent LGBTQ+ professionals, Schwartz explores all of the implications of marriage from name changes and getting a license to taxes, insurance, Social Security, and much more.Chapters on estate planning, pre- and post-nuptial agreements, and organizing finances make Before I Do a crucial handbook for anyone considering marriage--because, as Schwartz explains, just because you can get married does not mean you should.Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial. In Just Get On the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics (University of California Press, 2021), a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy. Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor in birth control is not natural. It is unjust.Nicole Bourbonnais is Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational, historical perspective. Profile here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies