New Books in Women's History

In the post 9/11 era in which Muslims in America have increasingly felt under the surveillance of the state, media, and the larger society, how have female Muslim students on US college campuses imagined, performed, and negotiated their religious lives and identities? That is the central question that animates Dr. Shabana Mir‘s dazzling new book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). This book was the winner of the Outstanding Book Award awarded by the National Association for Ethnic Studies.In her book, Dr. Mir engages a number of interlocking themes such as the varied and at times competing understandings of Islam among female Muslim undergraduates, the haunting legacy of Orientalist discourse and practice on U.S. college campuses, questions of religious authority among Muslim students on campus, and contradictions of pluralism in US higher education. Through a theoretically sophisticated and compelling ethnographic study focused on the college experience of female Muslim undergraduates at George Washington University and Georgetown University in Washington DC, Dr. Mir brings into view the hopes, tensions, and aspirations that mark the intersections of their religious and academic and social lives on campus. Some of the specific issues analyzed in this book include female Muslim American understandings of and attitudes towards alcohol culture on campus, clothing and the hijab, and questions of gender and sexual relations. Dr. Mir’s incredibly nuanced study shows both the diversity and complexity of the undergraduate experience for Muslim American students. This truly multidisciplinary book will be of much interest to not only scholars of Islam, American religion, gender, and anthropology, but also to anyone interested and invested US higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014) develops an anthropology of belonging, paying special attention to the ways that women and their communities understand and make decisions based... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and also a prolific writer. Christina Laffin‘s new book explores Abutsu’s life and written works, taking readers in turn through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A simple search for “Holocaust” on Amazon turns up a stunning 27,642 results. How can there still be uncovered terrain?Wendy Lower shows it is in fact possible to say new things about the Holocaust (to be fair, she’s following a handful of other scholars who have focused on gender and the Holocaust). Her questions are simple. What did the approximately 500,000 women who went East to live and work in the territories occupied by the German armies know about the killing of Jews (and other categories of victims)? To what degree did they participate in the killing? How did this experience affect them after the war?Her answers are disturbing, to say the least. For Lower uncovers ample evidence that women both witnessed and participated in the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets” in Eastern Europe. The patterns of participation varied, as did their acknowledgement of their actions. But the evidence is undeniable that women played a significant role in facilitating the Final Solution.Lower, along with people writing about Rwanda, about the frontiers of Australia and the United States, and a variety of other moments in time and space, illustrates our need to pay more attention to women and to gender in our study of mass violence. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), is an admirable contribution to the discussion, well-researched, well-written and emotionally compelling. I can’t think of a better place to start in examining these issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are Islam and feminism inherently at odds? Is there a contradiction between piety and gender justice? This is the guiding theme for Rachel Rinaldo, professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, in her book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2013). After more than eighteen months of fieldwork in the contemporary nation with the highest Muslim population, Indonesia, she found that global discourses on Islam and feminism were constantly in dialogue in this local context. Mobilizing Piety is an ethnography of women activists in Jakarta during a time of democratization, popular religious resurgence, and post-9/11 anxieties and suspicions. Rinaldo examined a feminist NGO, Muslim women’s organizations, and a Muslim political party to see how piety and politics intersected. In our conversation we discussed public aspects of piety, field theory, agency, polygamy, pornography, bodily politics, religion as cultural schema, and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in Constructing American Lives (1999), in nineteenth-century America “biography remained the essential genre for creating American pantheons: collections of lives that represented the nation’s history, aimed to promote values or virtues or both.” This function, however, often flies under the radar. People read biography to learn about real lives; they may not be consciously paying all that much attention to the lessons they transmit.In What Jackie Taught Us: Lessons from the Remarkable Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Perigree paperback reprint, 2014), author Tina Santi Flaherty (philanthropist, businesswoman and former radio broadcaster) drops all pretense and explicitly mines the life of Jackie O- a life with which, 20 years after her death, many Americans still feel intimately familiar- to see what we can learn from it. The result isn’t a self help book so much as a book that shows how we instinctively use the stories of lives and integrate them into our own. It’s a provocative exercise.Re-released here to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Onassis’s death, this version of What Jackie Taught Us includes a series of new essays that represent an important contribution to, not only Flaherty’s book, but also “Jackie studies” in general. It’s a treat to have the legacy of someone who’s so seldom considered seriously (so often she’s reduced to dresses and hats) reevaluated by the likes of Edna O’Brien, Allen Packwood, and Malacky McCourt. And Liz Smith’s preface is a downright gem.Twenty years after her death, we’re still curious about Jackie. From Flaherty’s book, we get some clues as to why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, doctors started to “medicalize” childbirth. Physicians began to think of ways to ease the pain of childbirth.Two main options were explored. One–drugs–is quite familiar to us, for it is the primary tool used by doctors to make women comfortable during the birth process today. The other–“psychoprophylaxis”–has now passed into memory. The most famous form of psychoprophylaxis, and the subject of Paula A. Michaels’ excellent book Lamaze: An International History (Oxford University Press, 2014), is known as the “Lamaze method.” Its history is fascinating and surprising: born in the Soviet Union (or was it the United Kingdom?), it migrated to France, and then to much of Europe. It then jumped the Atlantic and became a quasi-political force in the United States (“natural childbirth”). And Lamaze is still with us, though in a form hard to recognize. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) she explores contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership, sexuality and power in order to rethink patriarchal epistemologies in contemporary Muslim discourses. She argues that contesting positions on gender in these debates are underpinned by certain assumptions about human nature, its gendering, and existence. Shaikh outlines the social and ritual consequences of spiritual (in)equality and initiates reflections on Islamic notions of the central category “human being.” Shaikh leads us through Ibn ‘Arabi’s dynamic anthropology, ontology, and cosmology and links abstract philosophical concepts with concrete daily relationships between men and women. In our conversation we discussed Islamic feminism, apophatic unsayings and hermeneutic of subversions, Ibn ‘Arabi’s interpersonal relationships with women, parallels between the macrocosm and microcosm, Muslim exegesis, notions of creation, interpretations of Adam and Eve, Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, and masculine and feminine in Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her fourth book, Lynne Huffer argues for a restored queer feminism to find new ways of thinking about sex and about ethics. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia University Press, 2013) brings forth a breadth of sources — known and less well-known, French and American, primary and secondary — ranging from Colette, Violette Leduc, and Marcel Proust to the book of Genesis, from Supreme Court cases to Virginie Despentes’ rape-revenge film Baise-moi, from Irigaray to Foucault, through which Huffer reads and writes toward a queer feminist future. Beautifully written and stimulating for the theorist and non-theorist alike, Huffer’s new book combines the personal and the scholarly in experimental ways, such as her analysis of the Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham story. Carefully navigating the couloirs of queer and feminist theory, this is a book about sexuality, ethics, alterity, betrayal, and love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are the co-authors of authors of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (Crown Publishers 2014). Allen is White House bureau chief at Bloomberg; Parnes is White House correspondent for The Hill.This is a big, buzzy book that has gotten a lot of media attention. Much of the book is about how important trust is to Hillary Clinton. Allen and Parnes refer to the “concentric circles of trust” that dominate the political decisions made by the Clintons. They also write that Hillary Clinton has a “bias for action” that compels her to focus on doing rather than debating. One of the most interesting parts of the book is about how Secretary Clinton embraced technology and relied on staff to integrate technology into diplomacy innovative ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices