New Books in Gender

How was music important to medieval society? In Medieval Sex Lives:The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders (Cornell UP, 2023), Prof Elizabeth Eva Leach, a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford explores the history and content of the Douce 308 manuscript to tell the story of the cultural and sexual scripts that framed courtly life in the Medieval era. The book tells the long history of the idea of courtly love, as well as using contemporary theories and cultural practices to re-examine the songs and lyrics in the manuscript. A fascinating and absorbing read, the book will be of interest to humanities scholars and more widely to anyone interested in the history of music, sex, and sexuality. You can also find out more about the book here on Prof Leach’s blog.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection presents thirty-nine essays from distinguished scholars in philosophy, religion, literature, intellectual history, and other fields who consider the work of the eighteenth-century British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. A political and moral thinker and a forerunner to modern feminism she has not received attention on par with the wide breath of her ideas. The collection gives the reader insight into to her life, major works of philosophy and novels, debates with Edmund Burke and Rousseau, and enduring legacy. She commented on religion, liberalism, republicanism, moral virtue, education, women’s place in society and much more. Her ideas were known to women such as Lucretia Mott, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir who found in her a source for building a modern feminist philosophy. Timely and fruitful, The Wollstone-craftian Mind provides a board survey of an erudite thinker and a source for understanding the politics of the modern era.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Kate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography that addresses the puzzle and contradictions of the life of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drawn from never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how choices shaped her life. Beauvoir, a writer and feminist icon, won prestigious literary prizes and scandalized many with her now classic The Second Sex. She is now celebrated, but during her life she was a controversial figure both by conventional and feminists’ standards. As one who chose to write about lived ideas, both in fiction and essays, rather than build philosophical systems she was easily dismissed as Jean-Paul Sartre’s overly loyal side kick. Kirkpatrick shows how Beauvoir’s thinking evolved as a feminist and a philosopher – labels she was reluctant to embrace. The author reexamines the overemphasis on Beauvoir’s atheism, the extent of her political engagement, and her ethical failures in regard to third parties in the Sartre/Beauvoir relational triads. Beginning with her childhood to her adoption of Sylvie Le Bon, Kirkpatrick focuses on the significant relationships in Beauvoir’s life to expand our understand of how they shaped her thinking about the nature of subjectivity. Becoming Beauvoir demonstrates how the choices we make shape who we become.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history of feminist thought seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Why did the New York Public Library ban a novel about women’s independence? What was the Human Potential Movement? And who was Claire Myers Owens?Today’s book is: Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens (Syracuse University Press,, 2019) by Miriam Kalman Friedman, which is a biography of Owens, who grew up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, but sought adventure and freedom. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and intellectuals in New York’s Greenwich Village. There Owens wrote novels and short stories, including the controversial novel The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman’s Independence, which was banned by the New York Public Library for its “risqué” content. Drawn to ideals of self-actualization and creative freedom, Owens became a key figure in the Human Potential Movement along with founder Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley. In her later years, Owens devoted her life to the practice of Zen Buddhism, and published her final book, Zen and the Lady, at the age of eighty-three. Dr. Friedman’s rediscovery of Owens brings attention to her little known yet extraordinary life and passionate spirit. Drawing upon autobiographies, letters, journals, and novels, Dr. Friedman chronicles Owens’s robust intellect and her tumultuous private life.Our guest is: Dr. Miriam Kalman Friedman, who is a writing coach, editor, and lecturer. She has published multiple books on feminism, women, and women's studies. She is the author of Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also be interested in: Exploring the Emotional Arc of Turning a Dissertation into A Book Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle R. Boyd This discussion of the book Becoming the Writer You Already Are Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us here to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

She is benevolent and nurturing, yet fierce and terrible, a warrior and a lover. She creates and gives life, is death personified, and the one who grants eternal salvation. She is the ultimate form of reality, the cosmos. As the Saundaryalahiri says, "Only when Shiva joins with you, O Shakti, can he exert his powers as lord, on his own he has not even the power to stir. You are worshipped by Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, and other gods. How dare I, meritless mortal, offer you reverence and praise?" The Goddess inspires deep devotion and it is not surprising to see Her being worshipped and revered across homes in India.Nilima Chitgopekar's Shakti (DK Publishing, 2022) will delve into this rich tradition of the Divine Feminine as She is represented across India and the subcontinent. Shakti will be a one-of-a-kind linear exploration of Goddess worship, neither a basic guide nor a dense academic treatise. Instead, it will invite the reader to learn about the Shakta culture, while telling the story of its birth and evolution, the many manifestations of the Goddess and their worship, and the myths, legends, and rituals that make up the tradition. This title will position itself as the first point of entry for anyone interested in the world of the Devi and Her culture.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Katherine M. Marino, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses the contributions of Latin American and Caribbean women in the 20th century who championed feminism and played a key role in defining international human rights. Topics include their advocacy for recognizing women's biological role in human rights, US feminists' support in Latin America, the emergence and impact of popular front pan American feminism, the struggle for women's rights in the framework of human rights, and Latin American women's impact on the international human rights movement.

In Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short (Basic Books, 2019), Matthew Gutmann examines how cultural expectations viewing men as violent and sex driven becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dubious interpretations of the scientific study of the effects of testosterone, comparisons to the animal kingdom and the persistence of sex segregation reinforces ideas about what is natural. The idea that masculinity is the result of biology allows the “boys will be boys” excuse and reinforces patriarchal values harmful to women and setting false limits for male behavior. Presenting a cross-cultural survey Gutmann demonstrates how the variations across culture from Mexico to China contradict notions of a fixed masculinity. Seeing masculinity as a product of culture and malleable allows us to reimagine fathering, who is capable of leadership and offers new possibilities for how men and women will relate to each other.Matthew Gutmann is professor of anthropology at Brown University.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Scholars Stephen Engel and Timothy Lyle have a new book that dives into the thinking around power, political and cultural progress, and the LGBTQ+ communities in the United States. This book is fascinating and important in examining not only policy developments around rights and full citizenship for members of the LGBTQ+ communities, but also how these discussions and dialogues shape thinking about access to rights and dimensions of full citizenship. The overarching title of the book, Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives (NYU Press, 2021), gets to the heart of the rhetoric in the debate, specifically this concept of “dignity” and how dignity has become a particularly thorny component of defining out political, legal, and civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community. Both Engel and Lyle note that they found the term dignity very clearly associated with the legal reasoning in judicial opinions around LGBTQ+ rights, that it was a celebrated status, and that while it was more commonly used in international political rhetoric or in the legal dialogue in other countries, it is far less common in the United States and the U.S. legal tradition. And yet, it kept getting connected to the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights. Often, we think of dignity as an unalloyed good, but Engel and Lyle, as they start to unpack the way in which this term and concept are used, begin to reconsider exactly how and why this term, dignity, is also so often connected with LGBTQ+ communities, and not as connected to other communities and their legal, political, and civil rights. Engel and Lyle consider the way in which dignity is bestowed by the state, and in this way, how it becomes a tool of power. There is also the question of whether the way in which dignity is integrated into legal decisions helps to widen out equality, or does it instead redefine boundaries of otherness and inequality.In exploring the concept of dignity, especially as it has been connected to the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights, Engel and Lyle take the reader through three different case studies that examine the evolving rights status and rhetorical presentations of these kinds of dialogues and representations. These three case studies are kind of dialectics, in that they present two sides, often in tension with each other, wrestling with the power of the state, the individual’s rights, the social and cultural understandings of these situations, and the evolving outcomes. The first case study focuses in on the Politics of Public Health from AIDS to PREP. The second section of the book takes up popular culture representations of dignity—wrestling with the concept of sameness (in Love, Simon) in contrast with queer excess (in Pose). The final section of the book, and the part that might be of most interest to legal scholars, is the role of the courts in defining dignity in judicial opinions. This section also leads into the conclusion, as the authors take up the ongoing tension around the concept, implications, and use of dignity in regard to full citizenship, rights, and LGBTQ+ communities. Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives is a compelling exploration of the rights regimes in the United States and how the Constitution, the current cultural milieu, and the historical role of the state and state power have all contributed to this evolving question of full citizenship.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics 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 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women’s electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, James Keating's book Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880-1914 (Manchester UP, 2020) uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide―long considered the peripheries of the feminist world―cannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women’s movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has been a popular term to refer to gay people and sexual minorities more broadly. Based on ethnographic research and a solid theoretical base, Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (NIAS Press, 2018) explores queer identity, activism, and governmentality in China, where negotiations between socialism and neoliberalism play out. From a cultural studies perspective, Bao examines a variety of topics from queer spaces in urban centers such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou to conversion therapy diaries to queer film festivals. This book speaks to a wide variety of humanities and social science fields and will appeal to those interested in a fresh study of postsocialist China, gay identity formation, activism, and LGBT studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies