New Books in Gender

Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke UP, 2021) explores the significance of transnational educational mobility in the life aspirations of young, middle-class Chinese women. Based on extensive, long-term ethnographic research, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neo-traditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.Fran Martin is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on television, film, literature and other forms of cultural production in contemporary transnational China (The PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), with a specialization in transnational flows and representations and cultures of gender and sexuality.Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Nancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021) asks the questions of why and under what conditions overlapping systems of exploitation persist and decline. Folbre adds this book to a long repertoire of studying the economics of care, social reproduction, household-state relations, and women’s coalition building. In making sense of the gender-skewed outcomes of capitalist development, the undervaluation of care, and the dynamics of social reproduction, Folbre draws from various economic and sociological perspectives to introduce an analytical framework attuned to the multiple layers of patriarchal systems of control. The book’s theoretical toolbox (Part 1) is particularly valuable for those interested in key concepts and theories in feminist political economy. The Reconstructed Narratives (Part 2) engages readers with polemics on gendered dynamics of bargaining power, the disciplining of social reproduction labor, the intertwined nature of affect and care, and prospects for progressive collective organizing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In their edited volume Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media (Syracuse University Press, 2024), Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat complicate discussions of the veil and highlight the prevalent anxieties surrounding it. The edited volume is unique in its focus and engagement of the veil as it appears in various literary, artistic, and popular cultures, such as of historical Algeria and contemporary Iranian television series, Bollywood films, and street art in Europe. The book locates these critical discussions and theoretical interventions within both a postcolonial and neocolonial critique of how the veil was orientalised and fetishized historically, for example in the Victorian transmissions of the 1001 Nights, and how the veil, specifically the burka, is deployed in reductive and harmful ways in contemporary state projects today, as seen in France, and even in popular liberal discourses (such as in the United States). The essays in this collection are sharp and accessibly written and will be useful as a teaching tool in various undergraduate courses. The book will also be of interest to those who work on literature, popular culture, gender, Islam, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Catastrophic wartime casualties and postwar discomfort with the successes of women who had served in combat roles combined to shatter prewar ideals about what service meant for Soviet masculine identity. The soldier had to be re-imagined and resold to a public that had just emerged from the Second World War, and a younger generation suspicious of state control. In doing so, Soviet military culture wrote women out and attempted to re-establish soldiering as the premier form of masculinity in society.Erica L. Fraser's book Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union (U Toronto Press, 2019) combines textual and visual analysis, as well as archival research to highlight the multiple narratives that contributed to rebuilding military identities. Each chapter visits a particular site of this reconstruction, including debates about conscription and evasion, appropriate role models for cadets, misogynist military imagery in cartoons, the fraught militarized workplaces of nuclear physicists, and the first cohort of cosmonauts, who represented the completion of the project to rebuild militarized masculinity.Erica L. Fraser is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Untold Histories of Nigerian Women: Emerging from the Margins (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) is a curation of insightful and engaging narrations aimed at freeing women from the margins of Nigeria's history. It chronicles their protest movements against colonial administrations, including "monster" petitions on taxation and food price controls. It details a string of remarkable political landmarks which highlight women's historical credentials as nationalists, as well as their voice in early male-dominated legislative institutions. It also narrates more contemporary episodes in women's resistance against oil exploitation, environmental pollution and anger over the mass abduction of school girls. This timely preservation of the voice and agency of Nigerian women from a wide variety of colonial and contemporary documents will benefit readers interested in African history and gender and women's studies.Tayo Agunbiade is a journalist and social historian. She studied history at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and women development studies at the University of East London. She has published articles on women’s history and is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Tayo is Newsletter Editor for the Women’s History Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Gendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers (Oxford UP, 2024) presents for the first time a partial translation and study of Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi's work, al-Ijaba li-Iradi ma Istadraktahu Aisha Ala al-Sahabah-"The Corrective: Aisha's Rectification of the Companions. "It critically analyses from the perspective of hadith criticism a number of sections presenting Aisha's refutations and corrections of key Companions including, Umar b. al-Khattab, Abdullah b. Abbas, Zayd b. Thabit, and Abu Hurayra, applying classical hadith methodology to the scrutiny of narrators by way of impugnment and validation (al-jarh wa al-tadil) in an effort to re-construct and re-present Aisha as a central authority in Islamic knowledge production.This work constitutes a major rethinking of the Muslim hadith and jurisprudential traditions by evaluating how Aisha responded to hadiths that were circulating and being ascribed, often incorrectly, as authoritative statements of the Prophet Muhammad. From her critique of overwhelmingly male Companions of the Prophet, the study elicits a methodology for hadith criticism which is sure to challenge classical approaches. Sofia Rehman unearths the scholarly acumen of this great female Companion and mother of the believers, in her discussion of several legal positions which Aisha held in contradistinction to many of the male authorities among the Companions.This interdisciplinary study serves as a model for how the voice of Aisha may be given renewed life and significance in the way it re-centres her traditions and thinking. A crucial aspect is its contributing to expanding the horizons of multiple Islamic disciplines. A major contribution to the study of hadith lies in the development of an emergent methodology of Aisha in the scrutiny of the actual statements (matn) of traditions, not just the chains of transmission (isnad). The contributions of this study to the development of the Muslim legal tradition (fiqh) also lies in a framework that emerges from this research based on the pattern of how Aisha approaches juridical matters. The implications for this are many, especially regarding women and their spiritual and daily life and practice.“Sofia Rehman is an independent scholar of Islam, trained both traditionally in Syria and Turkey, and in Western academia, receiving her PhD from the University of Leeds. She advocates bridging the gap between scholarship on Islam and the Muslim community, setting up critical reading groups with global reach to facilitate learning and empowerment. She is a contributor to Mapping Faith: Theologies of Migration, edited by Lia Shimada, Cut from the Same Cloth?, edited by Sabeena Akhtar and Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation, edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang. She is author of A Treasury of Aisha Bint Abu Bakr.Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors (Temple UP, 2023) explores black women's experiences as mayors in American cities. The editor and contributors to this comprehensive volume examine black female mayoral campaigns and elections where race and gender are a factor--and where deracialized campaigns have garnered candidate support from white as well as Hispanic and Asian American voters. Chapters also consider how Black female mayors govern, from discussions of their pursuit of economic growth and how they use their power to enact positive reforms to the challenges they face that inhibit their abilities to cater to neglected communities.Case studies in this interdisciplinary volume include female mayors in Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, Compton, and Washington, DC, among other cities, along with discussion of each official's political context. Covering mayors from the 1960s to the present, Political Black Girl Magic identifies the most significant obstacles black women have faced as mayors and mayoral candidates, and seeks to understand how race, gender, or the combination of both affected them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In doing so, this study restores men’s health to medical histories of reproduction, demonstrating how men’s sexual self-identity was tied to their health.Charting genitourinary conditions across the life cycle, the book illustrates how fertility and potency were key to medical understandings of men’s health. Men utilised networks of care to help them with ostensibly embarrassing and shameful conditions like hernias, venereal disease, bladder stones, and testicular injuries. The book thus offers a historical voice to modern calls for men to be alert to, and open about, their own bodily health.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

In this highly original book Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Obert Bernard Mlambo offers a comparative and critical examination of the relationship between military veterans and land expropriation in the client-army of the first-century BC Roman Republic and veterans of the Zimbabwean liberation war. The study centres on the body of the soldier, the cultural production of images and representations of gender which advance theoretical discussions around war, masculinity and violence. Mlambo employs a transcultural comparative approach based on a persistent factor found in both societies: land expropriation. Often articulated in a framework of patriarchy, land appropriation takes place in the context of war-shaped masculinities.This book fosters a deeper understanding of social processes, adding an important new perspective to the study of military violence, and paying attention to veterans' claims for rewards and compensation. These claims are developed in the context of war and its direct consequences, namely expropriation, confiscation and violence. Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe contributes to current efforts to decolonise knowledge construction by revealing that a non-Western perspective can broaden our understanding of veterans, war, violence, land and gender in classical culture.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

Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide provides concrete information and approaches that will help instructors include women and people of color in the typical music history survey course and the foundational music theory classes. This book provides a reconceptualization of the principles that shape the decisions instructors should make when crafting the syllabus. It offers new perspectives on canonical composers and pieces that take into account musical, cultural, and social contexts where women and people of color are present. Secondly, it suggests new topics of study and pieces by composers whose work fits into a more inclusive narrative of music history. A thematic approach parallels the traditional chronological sequencing in Western music history classes. Three themes include people and communities that suffer from various kinds of exclusion: Locales & Locations; Forms & Factions; Responses & Reception. Each theme is designed to uncover a different cultural facet that is often minimized in traditional music history classrooms but which, if explored, lead to topics in which other perspectives and people can be included organically in the curriculum, while not excluding canonical composers.Dr. Horace J. Maxile, Jr. is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Baylor University. His primary interests are the concert music of Black composers, music semiotics, and gospel music. His research has appeared in scholarly journals such as Perspectives of New Music, American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Black Music Research Journal.Dr. Kristen M. Turner is a Lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her work centers on issues of race, gender, and class in American popular culture at the turn of the twentieth cen­tury. Her research has appeared in collected editions and scholarly journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, American Studies, and Musical Quarterly.Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies