New Books in Women's History

Pakistan is often caricatured and stereotyped as a volatile nuclear country on the precipice of disaster. Such depictions are often especially acerbic when comes to the issue of Women’s rights in the country. In her important new book, Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Anita Weiss, Professor of International Studies at the University of Oregon, provides a much-needed corrective to such sensationalist stereotypes. By exploring how multiple state and non-state actors have engaged the question of gender and women’s rights over time and space, Weiss demonstrates ways in which a diversity of voices in Pakistan conduct what she calls “everyday Ijtihad,” thus offering a much more nuanced and informed perspective. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues such as the history of the Pakistani state’s approach towards defining and engaging women’s rights, the role of Progressive NGOs like the Aurat Foundation, Orthodox Islamist voices on this question, and the Tehrik-i Taliban in Swat. This lucidly written book contains a plethora of useful information and analysis for specialists and non-specialists alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hildegard of Bingen was many things: a religious leader, a prolific letter-writer, a visionary prophet, possibly a compiler of medical lore, and certainly one of the most important composers of the 12th century. In recent years, Hildegard’s reception in academic circles has, for good and compelling reasons, focused on her status as a powerful, educated, and brilliantly creative woman in an era when few women were afforded such opportunities. But this has not been Hildegard’s only legacy.Jennifer Bain‘s recent book, Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of Medieval Composer (Cambridge University Press,2015), charts the 19th-century reception of Hildegard’s life and music, and in doing so provides valuable perspective on the version of Hildegard that we know and love today. As Bain demonstrates, Hildegard has been in an almost constant state of revival since the early 19th century, and at every turn she has meant something different: depending on the interests of the scholars who were reviving her (who were, themselves, grappling with very specific historical circumstances, including the long-term fallout of the Napoleonic wars and the very long-term fallout of the Protestant Reformation), Hildegard has been important as a German, a Catholic, a Benedictine, and a mystic, as well as as a woman.Further reading/listening:For listeners who are unfamiliar with Hildegard’s music, here is LaReverdie’s recording of one of the melodies mentioned in the interview: O virga ac diadema.There are also three publications by Prof. Bain which expand on issues that we discussed in this interview:“Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the Marketplace.” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 6, no. 1 (2004).“Hildegard, Hermannus, and Late Chant Style.” Journal of Music Theory 52, no. 1 (2008).“Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception of the Music of Hildegard of Bingen,” in The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Medieval and Renaissance Music: Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee, ed. Brian Power and Maureen Epp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 253-273. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was closely attuned to the concerns of its readers, the rhythm of everyday life, and the shifting global conjuncture” and a wonderfully rich historical... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism, Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to studying hip hop. Rooting her study in the Diggs Park Public Housing Project in Norfolk, Virginia, Durham examines what hip hop means to ordinary and everyday women who see themselves as hip hop, equals to the rappers and other artists who receive greater recognition and scholarly attention.By focusing on gender and social class, Durham explores the sexual scripts that women find and negotiate within hip hop and how hip hop continually navigates socio-economic boundaries. She also considers how the very act of studying and writing about hip hop can turn a hip hop “insider” into an outsider. The book spends considerable attention looking at Queen Latifah and Beyonce as key figures who both reinforce and interrogate dominant representations of African American women.Aisha Durham is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research about Black popular culture explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life. She examines how controlling images or power-laden stereotypes are produced by media makers and interpreted by media audiences to make sense of blackness in the “post” era. She is co-editor of Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (2007) and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy (2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alice J. Kang has written Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kang is assistant professor of political science and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.Much attention is paid to Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East, especially the contentious role of women’s rights in those countries. Less attention has been paid to Muslim democracies in Africa. Kang’s book focuses on the politics of women’s rights in one such country: Niger. Women’s rights activists in Niger have fought to participate in democratic governance, but haven’t won every recent battle. Kang highlights several successes as well as policy areas where women’s organizations have failed to win policy victories. The book has much to say about social movements and also the evolving way Muslim majority democracies grapple with human rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Identity, Youth, and Gender in the Korean American Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Christine Hong explores the lives of female Korean American Mainline Christian adolescents. Hong’s work, an exercise in feminist ethnography and practical theology, focuses on the difficulties these young women encounter as people who face marginalization within both broader American society and their own faith communities, and discusses ways to help them overcome these obstacles. Hong’s sensitive analysis is sure to benefit anyone interested in religion, ethnicity, and youth in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nanxiu Qian, professor at Rice University, discusses her new book Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2015). Qian argues that the role women played in the late Qing reform movements has heretofore been overlooked by historiography. Leading reformer Xue Shaohui was a critical poet, prose writer, educator, translator, and journalist. Xue married the literary traditions and scientific and technological advances of China and of the West. Her culturalist vision of women also married the writing-women tradition with her forward beliefs in gender equality. No subservient wife, Xue Shaohui played a central role in the reform networks of women and men and in the vibrant culture of debate that planted the seeds for women’s education and women’s visible role in public life in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does gender make war, and how does war make gender? In Gender, War, and Conflict (Polity Press, 2014), Laura Sjoberg (University of Florida) analyzes war and conflict through a gendered lens, arguing for the need for “gender mainstreaming” in the study of war. Paying attention to women, femininities, men, masculinities, and queerness, the book challenges the invisibility of gender in most analyses of war of conflict, even as gender plays a pivotal role in the function of war economies, in motivating people to fight wars, in conflict sexual violence, in interstate relations, and much more. Ultimately, Sjoberg makes the claim that the gendered structures of international politics make war possible, a dynamic we will miss unless we interrogate the ways that war and conflict are caused, justified fought, experienced, and felt from a feminist perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We live in a world awash with pornography, in the face of which anti-porn feminist philosophizing has not had much impact. In How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015), Nancy Bauer takes academic philosophy to task for being irrelevant and argues that philosophers should emulate Socrates in giving people reasons to reflect on their settled views. Bauer, who is professor of philosophy and dean of academic affairs for arts and sciences at Tufts University, considers the sexual objectification of women in contemporary society from several overlapping angles. She discusses the sense of empowerment that young women feel in today’s ‘hookup culture’ and defends a radical new reading J.L. Austin’s work on language that is at odds with the standard interpretation behind prominent feminist critiques of pornography. She also considers how white male dominance in academic philosophy has contributed to its lack of effectiveness, while applauding recent efforts by some to increase its diversity and its engagement with the public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard H. King is Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His book Arendt and America (University of Chicago, 2015) is an intellectual biography and transnational synthesis of ideas and explores how the German-Jewish exile and political thinker Hannah Arendt’s American experience shaped her thought as she sought an alternative to totalitarianism. Her books The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution display the marks of her engagement with the American Republic of the Founders and the possibilities of its survival under the threat of mass society. King examines her corpus as she engaged with the diversity of thought from the Western political tradition to mid-century America allowing us to see the range of her ideas. Her interests were neither social nor cultural, but the political sphere. In Cold War America, she became part of a moral center of the New York intellectuals and forged relationships with people such David Reisman, Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe, and Mary McCarthy. Arendt expressed a continual concern with the nature of political action, the possibility of new beginnings and the idea of the “banality of evil,” introduced in the controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Difficult to categorize ideologically, Arendt sought a “worldly” politic, rather than politics based in idealism or pragmatism. Her thought influenced post-war thinking on political participation, civil disobedience, race, the Holocaust and the meaning of republicanism and liberalism. King has given us a portrait of a complex, and often ironic, relationship of a seminal thinker with America as a place and a set of ideas and institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices