New Books in Gender

Today we are joined by Dr. Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor of Theatre History, and author of Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of women’s physical culture in the United States, the role that physical culture reformers played in producing femininity and whiteness, and the possibilities for anti-racist and anti-sexist sport to reconceptualize the white supremist roots of American athleticism.In Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Walsh traces the beginnings of reform era physical culture, paying special attention to the way that physical culturists attempted to shape women’s bodies. She argues that their efforts hinged on using exercise to produce femininity and whiteness and that they prefigured the larger eugenic movements aimed at perpetuating the white race later in the 20th century. In each chapter she looks at different physical culturists or physical cultural movement. Her second chapter looks at Steele MacKaye and Americanised Delsarte, a physical cultural practice that combined acting, dance and exercise. Her third chapter focuses on Dudley Allen Sargent and mimetic workouts that introduced working class motions – for example wood chopping - to middle and upper-middle class men and women at Ivy League colleges.The fourth and fifth chapter work together to unpack the complicated position of women’s physical culture, femininity and motherhood. In chapter four, Walsh shows how Abby Shaw Mayhew and the YWCA articulated a genre of motherhood, which Walsh calls “social motherhood,” that reframed women’s exercise as domestic and maternal rather than grotesque and masculine. In the fifth chapter, Walsh examines Bernarr MacFadden – the Barnum of physical culture – to showcases the places where advertising, motherhood, and women’s exercise came into explicit contact.Relying on a close reading of physical culture through critical theory, these main chapters trace the intersections between exercise, femininity, motherhood, race and social class, to illustrate how debates over these issues helped to produce whiteness. Whether they were in elite educational institutions in the Northeast, Midwestern metropolises like Minneapolis, or travelling around the country these experts helped to code physical culture as specifically as womanly, middle class, white, and ultimately as unremarkable.He final body chapter, chapter six, looks at physical culture for indigenous women in three sites: the Odanah Mission School, the Model Indian School at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Unlike their white counterparts, indigenous women were not offered significant opportunities for physical exercise and if they were it was only for the purpose of assimilation. Unsurprisingly, many indigenous girls and women challenged those expectations and were successful athletes.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Postcolonial feminist scholarship on the formation of gender relations primarily uses the analytic of colonizer-colonized dyad. In her new monograph, Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (Cambridge UP, 2020), Professor Hyaeweol Choi makes an important intervention by examining colonial Korea to propose a new framework that accounts for transnational encounters between national reformists, missionaries, and colonial authorities. Drawing from both major and minor archives in various geographic sites such as Korea, Japan, the US, Sweden, and Denmark, Choi locates the voices of the educated Korean women whose reform rhetoric and activities reflect transnational encounters. Postcolonial studies have shown us how archives are a contentious, political site with prominent feminist scholar Antoinette Burton pointing out the need to understand the interdependence between discursive visibility of minoritized people and their experiences. Through her research, Choi is able to show how educated women, despite their status as an elite minority, points to the larger structure of patriarchy and how it is constantly contested and reshaped by forces such as the state, ideologies of western domesticity, and religion.Gender Politics at Home and Abroad is an important read for scholars and public who are interested in postcolonial feminism, domesticity, transnational history, and colonial modernity. Hyaeweol Choi is a Professor who holds joint appointments with Religious Studies and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is also a C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies. Her publications include Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2013), and Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-era Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres (Peter Lang, 2020), Irune del Rio Gabiola examines the power of affect in structuring decolonizing modes of resistance performed by social movements such as COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras). Despite a harsh legacy of colonialism, indigenous communities continue suffering from territorial displacements, dispossession, and human rights abuses due to extractivist projects that are violently destroying their land and, therefore, the environment. In particular, the Lenca communities in Honduras have been negatively affected by Western ideas of progress and development that have historically eliminated ancestral knowledges and indigenous ecological cosmologies while reinforcing Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, by reflecting on and articulating strategies for resisting neoliberalism, COPINH and its cofounder Berta Cáceres' commitment to environmental activism, ecofeminism, and intersectional struggles has contributed affectively and effectively to the production of democratic encounters in pursuit of social justice. In homage to Berta, who was brutally assassinated for her activism in 2016, this book takes the reader on an affective journey departing from the violent affects experienced by the Lencas due to colonial disruption, contemporary industrialization, and criminalization, towards COPINH's political and social intervention fueled by outrage, resistance, transnational solidarity, care, mourning, and hope. In this way, subaltern actors nurture the power to--in line with Brian Massumi's interpretation of affect--transform necropolitics into natality with the aim of creating a fairer and better worldThe host, Elize Mazadiego, is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and author of Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955-1968 (Brill, 2021). She works on Modern and Contemporary art, with a specialization in Latin American art history.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Sylvia Chan-Malik is Associate Professor in the Departments of American and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She talks, teaches, and writes about the intersections of race, gender, and religion, with a focus on the history and cultures of Islam and Muslims in the United States. Her research highlights the lives, voices, histories, and representations of Muslim women, and reveals how critical legacies of Black freedom, women’s agency, and global liberation struggles have continually marked U.S. Muslim women’s engagements with Islam.She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (New York University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The anti-feminist movement in South Korea is gaining global attention. The story has been covered by many western mainstream news outlets including the New York Times, CNN, and BBC. Is this trend a new trend in South Korea? Where does this anti-feminist idea come from?In this episode, we invite Prof. Ju Hui Judy Han and discuss South Korean feminist history and gender politics. We discuss pre- and post-democratization feminist movements, the new president’s worrisome position on gender issues, and predict the future feminist movements in South Korea. We end our conversation with the conclusion that although there have been many obstacles, we cannot overlook the progress at the grassroots level. If you are interested in learning about South Korean feminist history, join Myunghee Lee for this interview with Judy Han.This is the second episode in the series. The first episode can be found here.About the interviewerMyunghee Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at NIAS. She also is a Non-resident Fellow at the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on protest, authoritarian politics, and democratization.About the speakerJu Hui Judy Han is a cultural geographer and assistant professor in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and has previously taught at the University of Toronto in Canada. Her comics and writings about (im)mobilities, faith-based movements, and queer politics have been published in journals such as The Scholar & Feminist Online, Critical Asian Studies, positions: asia critique, Geoforum, and Journal of Korean Studies as well as in several edited books such as Rights Claiming in South Korea (2021), Digital Lives in the Global City (2020), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and Territories of Poverty (2015). She is currently working on a book on “queer throughlines” and co-writing another book on protest cultures.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Today’s Postscript uniquely engages abortion politics by addressing structural political issues (voter suppression, gerrymandering, dilutions of minority voting, obstacles to women registering their positions politically), inconsistencies in Justice Samuel Alito’s majority draft, the ascent of the medical profession, the intersection of race, gender, and religion, narratives of morality, the genesis of white evangelical opposition, myths created by popular culture and abortion stereotypes, and more. Dr. Lilly J. Goren (Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University), Dr. Rebecca Kreitzer (Associate Professor of Public Policy and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Dr. Andrew R. Lewis (Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati), Dr. Candis Watts Smith (Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University and co-host of the Democracy Works Podcast) and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson (Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver).Some of the books and articles mentioned in the podcast: Diana Greene Foster, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having – or Being Denied – an Abortion Rebecca Kreitzer’s amazing slide deck of abortion facts and recommended reading list. Rebecca Kreitzer and Candis Watts Smith in the Monkey Cage, “What Alito’s draft gets wrong about women and political power” Andrew Lewis, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars Ziad Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists:How Social Movement Mobilization WorksJosh Wilson, Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right’s Radical Struggle to Transform Law & Legal Culture Mary Ziegler, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Banu Subramaniam examines how science and religion have come together to propel a vision of the modern Indian nation, and in particular, a Hindu nationalist vision of India. Subramaniam demonstrates that the politics of gender, race, class, caste, sexuality, and indigeneity are deeply implicated in the projects and narratives of the nation. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. 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

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and  the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados (Duke University Press, 2022), Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora.Nicole Charles is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies in Culture and Media, University of Toronto, Mississauga. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants.The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia UP, 2021) draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the diversity and multiplicity of liturgical practice, which he shows to be rooted in notions of Sufi sainthood. He considers the movement of Jahriyya vocal recitation to new media forms and foregrounds the gendered opposition of male voices and female silence that structures the group’s rituals.Spanning diverse disciplines—including anthropology, ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, sound studies, and media studies—and using Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, The Sound of Salvation offers new perspectives on the importance of sound to religious practice, the role of gender in Chinese Islam, and the links connecting Chinese Muslims to the broader Islamic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How does queer life fit into Buddhism and ritual? What role do gay men and trans women play in the practice of spirit mediumship and how do queer spirit mediums mediate between Thailand’s religious fields? How can we understand the increasing numbers of queer spirit mediums across mainland Southeast Asia?Peter A. Jackson and Benjamin Baumann provide important insights into their new book Deities and Divas, Queer Ritual Specialists in Myanmar, Thailand and Beyond (NIAS Press 2021). Deities and Divas is the first book to trace commonalities between queer and religious cultures in Southeast Asia and the West. The book details the very prominent roles that gay men and trans women are playing in the spirit medium cults rapidly growing in Myanmar, Thailand and beyond.Visit the NIAS Press Webshop to find the book.Peter A. Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Thai cultural history at the Australian National University. Over the past four decades, he has written extensively on religion, gender and sexuality in modern Thailand as well as critical approaches to Asian area studies. His ongoing research includes studying media and masculinity in Thai gay cultures and religion and ritual in Thai communities affected by HIV.Benjamin Baumann is an assistant professor at the University of Heidelberg. His ethnographic work examines rural lifeworlds, socio-cultural identities and local language games in Thailand's lower Northeast, focusing on how the ghostly structures the imagination, reproduction of social collectives and communal sentiments of belonging.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies