New Books in Gender

In Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020) anthropologist and activist Sa’ed Atshan explores the Palestinian LGBTQ movement and offers a window into the diverse community living both in historic Palestine and in diaspora.His timely and urgent account contends that the movement has been subjected to an “empire of critique,” which has inhibited its growth and undermines the fight against homophobia in the region and beyond. On the one hand, explains Atshan, queer Palestinians must contend with the harsh realities of patriarchal nationalism, homophobia and heteronormativity, Israeli occupation, dehumanizing discourses such as ‘pinkwashing,’ and the legacies of western imperialism.At the same time, Atshan argues that critiques against such issues – leveled by academics, journalists, and even queer activists – have contributed to a stifling ideological purism that has put activists on the defensive and alienates some queer Palestinians.Along with a succinct presentation of the immense challenges faced by the LGBTQ-identifying Palestinians, Atshan highlights Palestinian agency, ingenuity, and resilience. He considers how progressive social movements around the world can navigate the often fraught and complex dynamics of intersectional activism, and leaves his readers with a vision of a diverse queer Palestinian movement capable of “radically reimagining possible futures.”Sa’ed Atshan is an assistant professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College.Joshua Donovan is a History PhD candidate and Core Preceptor at Columbia University. His dissertation examines competing conceptions of identity and subjectivity within the Antiochian Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (MHM Limited and Amsterdam University Press, 2022) offers a comprehensive overview of women writers in Japan, from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Featuring 24 newly written contributions from scholars in the field—representing expertise from North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia—the Handbook introduces and analyzes works by modern and contemporary women writers that coalesce loosely around common themes, tropes, and genres. Putting writers from different generations in conversation with one another reveals the diverse ways they have responded to similar subjects. Whereas women writers may have shared concerns—the pressure to conform to gendered expectation, the tension between family responsibility and individual interests, the quest for self-affirmation—each writer invents her own approach. As readers will see, we have writers who turn to memoir and autobiography, while others prefer to imagine fabulous fictional worlds. Some engage with the literary classics—whether Japanese, Chinese, or European—and invest their works with rich intertextual allusions. Other writers grapple with colonialism, militarism, nationalism, and industrialization. This Handbook builds a foundation which invites readers to launch their own investigations into women’s writing in Japan.Professor Rebecca Copeland is a professor of Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Copeland’s research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary women’s writing in Japan, modern literature and material culture, and translation studies. She is the author of The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo (1992) and Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (2000), the latter of which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2001. She is the editor of Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women's Writing (2006) and co-editor of The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (2001) and Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (2006), and Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History (2018). Professor Copeland also translates one of the most well-known Japanese woman writer, Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque (2007) and Joshinki (The Goddess Chronicles, 2012). The Goddess Chronicles won the 2014-15 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Professor Copeland is also a creative writer and her debut novel, The Kimono Tattoo, was published in 2021.Linshan Jiang is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Her primary research project focuses on female writers’ war experiences and memories of the Asia-Pacific War, entitled Women Writing War Memories. Her second research project explores how queerness is performed in Sinophone queer cultural productions. She has published articles about gender studies and queer studies in literature and culture as well as translations of scholarly and popular works in Chinese and English. She has been making a podcast named Gleaners with her friends for more than ten years and she is also a host of the East Asian Studies channel for the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh (U Minnesota Press, 2022) examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital's targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women's aspirations for the "good life" not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital.Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women's wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

During the COVID pandemic, billions of dollars in relief aid was sent out to help us ride out the storm, although many people who struggled through it might scratch their heads at such a number, having seen little of it make any concrete impact in their own lives. This discrepancy is indicative of the underlying problem with the contemporary care economy, a series of federal and state programs, healthcare facilities and NGO’s, all trying to bend the needs of those under their care to the mechanisms and incentives laid out by capitalism. The result is a massive apparatus that regularly fails to fulfill its supposed intentions, leaving workers and those in need of help in precarious and often dangerous situations. This apparatus is untangled and explained in clear detail by Premilla Nadasen in her book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023). Informed by both her work as a historian and as a political activist, she manages to untangle and explain why the massive apparatus regularly fails to fulfill its purpose. She also outlines offramps, forms of resistance that workers and activists have taken to develop alternative anticapitalist forms of care that might someday allow us to truly flourish together.Premilla Nadasen is a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the co-director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is also the author of Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The book Present Woman: Our Pleasure, Our Power (2023) is an honest and rare first-person account for female seekers and curious men. A woman in her twenties embarks to discover her sexuality and learns how her journey towards pleasure affects her career, her attitude to money, and her relationships.Narkis Alon participates in sexuality workshops around the world, leads entrepreneurial workshops, marries her true love, undergoes an Ayahuasca ceremony, gives birth, speaks at the U.N., and explores and affirms the connection between fulfillment and pleasure. Through the accompanying booklet, readers are invited to embark on a personal journey to discover their own pleasure, awaken their body, and express the creativity stirring within them.Narkis Alon is a social entrepreneur, content creator, and bestselling author. She leads workshops in Israel and abroad on female leadership and the body-mind connection in business organizations and academic institutions. She created and hosts the podcast "Playing with Fire" on the subject of healthy sexuality and manages a virtual community of tens of thousands of men and women who share on such topics as relationships, sexuality, and gender. She co- founded Double You, an international leadership community that encourages women to lead social and business initiatives with community support. She was selected by Calcalist as one of the leading social leaders in Israel and by the American Real Leaders magazine as one of 100 visionary leaders in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke UP, 2023), Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritized pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. Instead, Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers’ ability to care for themselves and their dependents.Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice (NYU Press, 2024) examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers’ struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor—a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people’s time is less valuable than that of other people.Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.' So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History (Mudlark, 2024) is a vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction. In it, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’.Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D'Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. This book is also a forceful intervention that challenges hegemonic data science by exploring the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification and drawing lessons for a restorative and transformative data science.This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Tessa Winkelmann examines interracial social and sexual contact between Americans and Filipinos in the early twentieth century via a wide range of relationships—from the casual and economic to the formal and long term. Dr. Winkelmann argues that such intercourse was foundational not only to the colonisation of the Philippines but also to the longer, uneven history between the two nations. Although some relationships between Filipinos and Americans served as demonstrations of US "benevolence," too-close sexual relations also threatened social hierarchies and the so-called civilizing mission. For the Filipino, Indigenous, Moro, Chinese, and other local populations, intercourse offered opportunities to negotiate and challenge empire, though these opportunities often came at a high cost for those most vulnerable.Drawing on a multilingual array of primary sources, Dangerous Intercourse highlights that sexual relationships enabled US authorities to police white and nonwhite bodies alike, define racial and national boundaries, and solidify colonial rule throughout the archipelago. The dangerous ideas about sexuality and Filipina women created and shaped by US imperialists of the early twentieth century remain at the core of contemporary American notions of the island nation and indeed, of Asian and Asian American women more generally.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies