New Books in Gender

The United States has more guns than people and more gun violence than any Western democracy. Scholars in diverse fields interrogate why 21st century Americans support gun ownership and valorize vigilantism even as they fear gun violence. Many question how the NRA – National Rifle Association – has successfully lobbied for radical gun laws that most Americans don’t support. In Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Alexandra Filindra highlights political culture. She argues that the NRA depends upon political narratives that can be traced back to the American Revolution. Rather than focus on the constitution, Lockean liberalism, rule of law, or individual rights, she argues that the American Revolution depended upon classical republican ideals – especially the martial virtue of the citizen-soldier – that became foundational to American democracy. American gun culture fuses the republican citizen-soldier with White male supremacy to create what Filindra calls ascriptive martial republicanism. Her book demonstrates how the militarized understandings of political membership prominent in NRA narratives and embraced by many White Americans fit within this broader revolutionary ideology.Even as contemporary NRA narratives embrace 18th and 19th century versions of ascriptive martial republicanism, the NRA radically decouples political virtue and military service by associating virtue with the consumer act of purchasing a firearm. Rather than emphasizing military service or preparedness, consumer choice defines the politically virtuous citizen.White Amerians embrace this combination of civic republicanism and White male supremacy but Filindra’s research shows that they also hold a competing form of republicanism (inclusive republicanism) that includes a commitment to peaceful political engagement, civic forms of voluntarism and participation, and a strong belief in multiculturalism.In the podcast, Susan mentions previous podcasts on Katherine Franke’s Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition and Drew McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America.Dr. Alexandra Filindra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She specializes in American gun politics, immigration policy, race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and political psychology.George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

From rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman's wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society.The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Elisabeth Gernerd highlights the significance of these elements of a woman's wardrobe in 1770s and 1780s Britain and the Atlantic World, and shows how they played their part in transforming fashionable dress when this was expanding to new heights and volumes. Dissecting the female silhouette into regions of the body and types of dress and shifting away from a broad-sweeping stylistic evolution, this book explores these potent players within the woman's armoury. Marrying material, archival and visual approaches to dress history, and drawing on a rich range of sources – including painted portraiture, satirical prints, diaries, memoirs – The Modern Venus unpacks dress as a medium and mediator in women's lives. It demonstrates the importance of these overlooked garments in defining not just a woman's silhouette, but also her social and cultural situation, and thereby shapes our understanding of late 18th-century life.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

Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and extending French sovereignty over Algeria, this system deprived Algerian Muslims of full citizenship rights while reinforcing French colonial authority.Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a rigorous and provocative critical "history of the present" that illuminates the persistence of the "Muslim question" in contemporary France. In chapters focused on polygamy, repudiation, and child marriage, the book traces the ways that the French fantasies of the family, including the sexualization of Muslim women and a preoccupation with the sexual "excesses" of Muslim men, found expression in legislation that segregated the legal control of property from the regulation of bodies, beliefs, and personhood. A fascinating genealogy that understands colonial law and the problem of difference within a broader cultural field, the book is an impressive, compelling analysis with striking resonances for a Franco-Algerian present still shaped by the legacies of the colonial past.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.Jennifer V. Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University and author of Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin.Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Selby Wynn Schwartz writes about gender, performance, and the politics of embodiment. Her articles have been published in Women & Performance, PAJ, Dance Research Journal, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Critical Correspondence, Ballet-Dance Magazine, In Dance, The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, and the forthcoming anthology (Re)Claiming Ballet. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature and currently teaches writing at Stanford University.The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives (University of Michigan Press, 2019) covers four decades of drag dances, exploring the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, the book delves into four decades of drag dances. It takes us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, dancers give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics.Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle’s edited collection Grave History: Death, Race and Gender in Southern Cemeteries (University of Georgia Press, 2023), demonstrates how Jim Crow laws extended into the realms of the dead. Cemeteries throughout the Southern states either relegated Black funerals to the margins in existing cemeteries or excluded the community altogether, often citing the excuse that inclusion would create unrest amongst white lot-holders, and disturb the peace of the cemetery. Burial spaces become demonstrative of oppression, but could also signal resistance to oppression. This impressive text provides an essential primer in African American cemetery history and illustrates how the Black community created frameworks of community support to ensure that homegoing services were dignified and affordable. Chapters also explore the historic importance of African American burial grounds, where grave markers are uniquely important to the recreation of otherwise poorly documented communities. The chapters also lean into the problems intrinsic to interpreting the material culture of oppression, where historic Black identities risk becoming fixed within narratives of victimhood.The book includes workshop guidance for teachers, for use with students at all stages in the education process.Dr Julie Rugg is Director of the Cemetery Research Group, University of York, UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Ayelet Brinn offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers.Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. For many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, acclimating to America became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as the newspapers and their staffs became a fusion of friends, religious and political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies.In A Revolution in Type, Dr. Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.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

Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Amy Langenberg, a scholar of South Asian Buddhism, gender, sexuality, and the body. We focus on Amy’s work on misogyny in Buddhist texts, her book on Buddhist embryology, and her current project on sexual abuse in contemporary Buddhist communities. Along the way we discuss miscarriage, menstruation, and the importance of feminist scholarship . . . and also, what does the Buddha have in common with Michael Phelps?Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not all of our episodes are distributed by NBN, so be sure to subscribe to Blue Beryl!Resources mentioned in this episode: Amy Langenberg, Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom (2017) Pierce Salguero, "'This Fathom-Long Body': Bodily Materiality and Ascetic Ideology in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Scriptures" (2018) Amy’s academic papers, free to download on Academia.edu Pierce Salguero (ed.), Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources (2017) Amy Langenberg, "The Buddha Didn’t Teach Consent" (2021) The Buddhist Bodies Collective Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Survivor-Centered Solutions: #MeToo and Spiritual Abuse” (CBC Radio) Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, "Abuse, Sex and the Sangha: A Series of Healing Conversations” (video playlist) Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Sexual Ethics and Healthy Boundaries in the Wake of Teacher Abuse” (2023) Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, “Supporting Survivors of Abuse” (video) Amy Langenberg and Ann Gleig, "Sexual Misconduct And Buddhism - Centering Survivors" (2020) Amy Langenberg, “Late Night Phone Alerts And Other Intrusions: What To Expect When You Write About Sexual Violation In Religion” (2021) Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

When Algerians of the 1920s and 30s imagined the future of their country, women’s liberation was foundational to their vision. From the first generation of French-educated schoolteachers, to urban domestic workers who challenged spatial and economic divisions, to nationalist journalists pushing back against French colonial claims, Sara Rahnama describes how a range of Algerian actors conceived of women’s rights and responded to new developments in their own country and across the Middle East. The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2023) reveals a broad consensus that the advancement of Muslim women was necessary to Algeria’s progress. Rahnama draws on new sources to explain the “ecosystem of intellectual energy devoted to Muslim” that debated girls’ education, women’s employment, voting rights, and women’s and men’s headwear. The book places Algeria in a broader regional conversation, as writers turned to Islamic teachings and history and looked to contemporary changes to women’s political and social opportunities in Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Palestine to justify needed reforms in Algeria. These discussions in the interwar period sowed seeds that would blossom in the 1950s and 60s as Algerian women joined the nationalist movement, and gained new platforms to contribute their own opinions to these contested issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In 1912, at age 24, Georgia O’Keeffe boarded a train in Virginia and headed west, to the prairies of the Texas Panhandle, to take a position as art teacher for the newly organized Amarillo Public Schools. Subsequently she would join the faculty at what was then West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University). Already a thoroughly independent-minded woman, she maintained an active correspondence with her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and other friends back east during the years she lived in Texas.In Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters (Texas A&M UP, 2020), Amy Von Lintel brings to readers the collected O’Keeffe correspondence and added commentary and analysis, shining fresh light on a period of the artist’s life she characterizes as “some of the least appreciated in the vast O’Keeffe scholarship,” but also as “a time when she discovered her own voice as a young, successful, and independent woman . . . a dedicated faculty member at a brand-new college . . . a vibrant social butterfly . . . a progressive woman who spoke her mind and fought for her beliefs to be heard.”Although selected paintings by O’Keeffe that support the narrative are featured, this work focuses on O’Keeffe’s words. By doing so, Von Lintel aims to allow the artist’s voice to “emerge as a powerful witness of her own life, but also of western America in a pivotal moment of its development.” The result is an important new examination of one of our most beloved artists during a time when she was in the process of discovering her future identity.Amy Von Lintel is the Doris Alexander Endowed Professor of Fine Arts at West Texas A&M University. She is the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors and coauthor of Robert Smithson in Texas. She resides in Amarillo, Texas.Kirstin L. Ellsworth is an Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies