It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? In her captivating book Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Hachette, 2023), Dr. Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, shows us how we tuck gender politics, security, sexuality, and privilege inside our pockets.In mediaeval Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature carried by men and women alike. But when tailors stitched the first pockets into men’s trousers 500 years ago, it ignited controversy and introduced a range of social issues that we continue to wrestle with today, from concealed pistols to gender inequality, as noted in hashtags like #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath.This abundantly illustrated four-colour book explores much more than who has pockets and why. How is it that putting your hands in your pocket can be seen as a sign of laziness, arrogance, confidence, or perversion? Walt Whitman’s author photograph, hand in pocket, for Leaves of Grass, seemed like an affront to middle class respectability. When W.E.B. DuBois posed for a portrait, his pocketed hands signalled defiant coolness.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Cervical cancer kills almost 350,000 women each year. What's more horrifying, is that millions have died of this disease that's nearly 100% preventable. It's no secret that healthcare is full of inequities, with a severe lack of accessible screening programs. But women's health care is also impeded by cultural, gender, and political barriers, issues that have combined to create devastating consequences. In Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr Linda Eckert takes her years of experience and weaves it together with the voices of the courageous women who use their own experience of cervical cancer to advocate for change. This heart-breaking, yet hopeful, book takes you through the world of cervical cancer with evidence-based information, personal stories and actionable outcomes. Society flourishes when women have access to safe and affordable healthcare. Together we can make this need a reality and eliminate the world's most preventable cancer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

It has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-definition is in terms of sexuality (lesbians, gay men, bisexuals) and those for whom it is gender identity (intersex and transgender people, genderqueers) as simultaneously in coalition and distinct from each other, on the assumption that gender and sexuality are independent aspects of self-identification. Re-examining how the Victorians considered such identity categories to have produced and shaped each other can ground a more durable basis for strengthening our present LGBTQ+ coalition.LGBT Victorians draws on scholarship reconsidering the significance of sexology and efforts to retrospectively discover transgender people in historical archives, particularly in the gap between what the nineteenth century termed the sodomite and the hermaphrodite. It highlights a broad range of individuals (including Anne Lister, and the defendants in the "Fanny and Stella" trial of the 1870s), key thinkers and activists (including Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter), and writers such as Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds to map the complicated landscape of gender and sexuality in the Victorian period. In the process, it decenters Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment from our historical understanding of sexual and gender nonconformity.Simon Joyce is Professor of English, College of William and Mary. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Sussex and a PhD from the University of Buffalo. He is a Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he teaches Victorian and modernist literature from Britain and Ireland and LGBTQI+ Studies.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. 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 significance of gender and masculinities in understanding conflict?Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2013 and 2016, Amya Agarwal's book Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented by the state armed forces and the non-state actors in the Kashmir valley. In addition, the book broadens the understanding of women's agency through its engagement with the construction, performance, and interplay of masculinities in the conflict.Combining existing elements of both feminist research and critical scholarship on men and masculinities, the book highlights the significance of foregrounding the interplay of men's identities in conflicts to understand agency in a meaningful way. Through the focus on the simultaneous play of multiple masculinities, the book also questions the oversimplified and monolithic usage of masculinity being associated only with violence in conflicts.The empirical data in the book includes interviews and narratives of multiple stakeholders belonging to diverse vantage points in the Kashmir conflict. Some of these include activists, widows, wives of the disappeared, ex-militants, surrendered militants, participants of the stone-pelting movement, mothers of sons killed in the conflict, women representatives of the village Halqa Panchayats, and army personnel. The book also draws from alternative material in the form of graffiti, folk songs, poetry on graves, and slogans. Through anecdotal reminiscence, the author reflects on the challenges of field research in Kashmir that served as an opportunity for self-contemplation.Dr. Amya Agarwal is a senior researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Freiburg, Germany. She also teaches at the University of Freiburg and University College Freiburg. Her research interests include gender, conflict and security in South Asia; critical masculinities studies and visuality, and aesthetics in war and resistance.Tusharika Deka is a PhD student in International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Currently, she serves as an Editor-at-large for E-International Relations and as the Social Media Editor for Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor and Francis. Previously she was the Assistant Editor for the Asia Dialogue, an online journal affiliated with the Asia Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. On Twitter: @Tusharika24. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale UP, 2023) revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.Omari Averette-Phillips is a History educator based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@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

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State (Floating Opera Press, 2023) expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.Lea Greenberg is an editor, translator, and scholar of German and Jewish studies. 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 intersex and why does it matter? What is the power of law to disrupt dominant narratives? I had a fascinating conversation with authors Dr Fae Garland and Dr Mitchell Travis about their book, Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Disorder (Bristol UP, 2023). We got into detail about these groundbreaking human rights issues. We spoke about the very real challenges faced in conducting legal research that has meaningful impact for social change. In research spanning many years, Garland and Travis worked directly with intersex people and their parents to produce this nuanced, sensitive and extensively researched book. Their's is a monograph that challenges dominant medical narratives, particularly with regard to the way that gender binaries are demarcated and identities are constructed. The book has power both beyond its subject matter and beyond the academy: it will bring pause for reflection as to the role of researchers and the work that lawyers can do in the pursuit of the acceptance and emergence of difference, and especially with regard to the enforcement of human rights. Dr Fae Garland is a Senior Lecturer in Law at The University of Manchester Dr Mitchell Travis is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Social Justice at The University of Leeds.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Sarah E. Stoller, Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain (MIT Press, 2023) is the first historical examination of working parenthood in the late twentieth century--and how the concepts of "family-friendly" work culture and "work-life balance" came to be.Since the 1980s, families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. With more mothers than ever before in paid work and the rise of the middle-class, dual-income household, we have entered a new era in the history of everyday life: the era of the working parent. In Inventing the Working Parent, Stoller charts the politics that shaped the creation of the phenomenon of working parenthood in Britain as it arose out of a new culture of work.Stoller begins with the first sustained efforts by feminists to mobilize politically on behalf of working parents in the late 1970s and concludes in the context of an emerging national political agenda for working families with the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. She explores how and why the notion of working parenthood emerged as a powerful new political claim and identity category and addresses how feminists used the concept of working parenthood to advocate for new organizational policies and practices. Lastly, Stoller shows how neoliberal capitalism under Margaret Thatcher and subsequent New Labour governments made a family's ability to survive on one income nearly impossible--with significant consequences for individual experience, the gendered division of labor, and intimate life. 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 Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature--how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Abena Ampofoa Asare, and Michelle Dionne Thompson's book When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) focuses on the journeys of over thirty Black women at various stages of their careers.Joy is a mixture of well-being, pleasure, alignment, and purpose that can be elusive for Black women scholars. With racial reckoning and a global pandemic as context, this volume brings together honest and vital essays that ponder how Black women balance fatigue and frustrations in the halls of the ivory tower, and explore where, when, and if joy enters their lives. By carefully contemplating the emotional, physical, and material consequences of their labor, this collection demonstrates that joy is a tactical and strategic component of Black women's struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In this podcast, Amy Harris, author of 'Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried,' explores the experiences of unmarried individuals and childless family members in Georgian England. Topics include marriage standards, sibling conflict, family dynamics, the role of aunts and uncles, and 18th-century genealogical practices.