New Books in Gender

Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word – it's not always entirely clear what it means. Bitch is a chameleon. There are good bitches and bad bitches; sexy bitches and psycho bitches; boss bitches and even perfect bitches. Bitch: The Journey of a Word (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Stollznow presents an eye-opening deep-dive account that takes us on a journey spanning a millennium, from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog through to its myriad meanings today, proving that sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. It traces the colorful history and ever-changing meaning of this powerful and controversial word, and its relevance within broader issues of feminism, gender, race, and sexuality. Despite centuries of censorship and attempts to ban it, bitch has stood the test of time. You may wonder: is the word going away anytime soon? Bitch, please. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Edited by Todd A. Henry, Queer Korea (Duke UP, 2020) offers a vital and long-overdue examination of this subject. More than an academic text, it is a powerful collection that brings to light the hidden histories of non-normative sexuality and gender expression on the Korean Peninsula. The book challenges the notion that queerness is a recent, Western import. Instead, it uncovers a rich and complex history of same-sex unions and diverse identities—stories that have too often been silenced or strategically used to reinforce nationalistic and patriarchal ideals. It also explores how media and society, from the colonial era to the present day, have deployed discourses of deviance as a means of control and assimilation. What makes Queer Korea especially compelling is that it is not the work of one voice alone, but a union effort of many dedicated scholars who have each contributed their expertise to the field. Together, they create a multidimensional picture of queer life in Korea, bridging personal narratives, historical analysis, and cultural critique. Queer Korea is essential reading for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of Korean history. It highlights struggles for visibility, the quiet resilience of “under-the-radar” communities, and the surprising ways queer lives have helped shape the nation’s cultural and social landscape. Above all, it reminds us that queer history is not separate, but deeply woven into the very fabric of a country’s past. A Personal Journey Behind the Book The project grew not only out of academic curiosity, but also from Henry’s personal encounters and experiences in South Korea. These moments became the spark that inspired him to unearth stories too often overlooked. The journey of bringing the book to life was not without challenges, yet his determination to make these histories visible remained a powerful driving force. That personal investment—combined with the collective commitment of the contributing scholars—infuses the work with a depth and authenticity that makes Queer Korea resonate even more strongly. Dr Todd A. Henry (PhD, UCLA, 2006; Assistant/Associate Professor, UCSD, 2009-Present) is a specialist of modern Korea with an interest in the period of Japanese rule (1910-1945) and its postcolonial afterlives (1945-). A social and cultural historian attuned to global forces that (re) produce lived spaces, he studies cross-border processes linking South Korea, North Korea, Japan, and the US in the creation of “Hot War” militarisms, the transpacific practice of medical sciences, and the lived experiences of heteropatriarchal capitalism. Also a historian of gender, sex, and sexuality, Dr. Henry seeks to expand Euro-American-centric approaches to queerness, transgenderism, and intersexuality through a sustained focus on Asian forms of embodiment that center the geopolitics of imperialism/colonialism, military occupation, and diasporic mobility. Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include the exploration of overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. She is also a freelance translator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How is it possible to be a subject when faced with oppression? The revolutionary thought and work of French novelist and lesbian thinker Monique Wittig are today in dialogue with feminist and LGBTQIA+ analyses and politics. Her materialist theorization of lesbianism subfuses contemporary feminism and queer political and social movements. By proposing a detailed analysis of heterosexuality as a total political regime, Wittig as a theorist, writer, and activist opens up the possibility of a world beyond the categories of sex and gender, founded on a new definition of the human. This book acts as a roadmap to help us reach such a horizon. Sara Garbagnoli and her co-author Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz situate Wittig within array of feminist movements of the 20th century and explain why her theories are so pertinent in today's political landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) explores the experiences of women porters, called kayayei, in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, anthropologist Laurian R. Bowles shows how kayayei navigate precarity, bringing into sharp relief how racialization, rooted in histories of colonialism and enslavement, undergirds capital accumulation in Ghana. Bowles's ethnographic storytelling follows these women through their work as human transporters at Ghanaian markets. In creatively reappropriating public spaces as private sanctuaries, and in reimagining expected social relations through the cultivation of liberatory same-sex intimacies, kayayei develop ways to cope with the demands of their arduous labor while refusing narratives of victimhood projected on African women. Bowles's analysis of the emotional labor of the gig economy in Africa shows how the infrastructure anxieties of a modernizing city intersect with the complexities of blackness in a racially homogeneous nation, uncovering how antiblackness emerges in everyday public discourse, development agendas, and privately expressed anxieties about labor, gender, and sexual politics in Accra. Illustrating how race, sexuality, and gender manifest in daily life, Bowles centers kayayei, often perceived to be obstacles to progress and modernity, at the forefront for understanding urban Ghana's aspirations and anxieties about what it means to be a modern African country. Grounded in African feminist theory and Black feminist ethnography, Headstrong uses women's narratives as the central analytic for understanding the look and feel of modernity in Accra, challenging long-standing notions of gender, race, and desire in Africa. Laurian Bowles is the Vann Professor of Racial Justice and Associate Professor & Chair of the Anthropology Department at Davidson College. Jessie Cohen earned her Ph.D. in African History from Columbia University and is Assistant Editor at the New Books Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the battlefields at Gettysburg or Antietam, nor to Mount Vernon, but to the gravesite of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George. While dedicating the new monument that marked it in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Cleveland honored “the woman who gave our Nation its greatest and best citizen.” There could be no clearer valorization of eighteenth-century republican motherhood and its centrality to the nation's origin story.The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Kate Haulman examines the role of motherhood in the commemoration of the American Revolution by tracing the creation and evolution of the Mother of Washington figure. Dr. Haulman explores the nineteenth-century memory of an eighteenth-century woman known for and through her famous son, the nation's first president. Underpinned by a canon of stories about Mary that often involved George, the monument and the figure it memorialized overlapped, sometimes in surprising and even paradoxical ways. In print, in images, and on the landscape, memorializing Mary foregrounded maternal ideals based in traditional gender roles and ancestry in the public memory of the nation's founding. As some women framed their engagement with the state in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation's origins. Women memorialists finally took up the cause to complete the monument, finishing what elite men had begun decades earlier.Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood, as well as using motherhood to engage with the founding past. The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America offers fresh arguments about gender, race, and the politics of Revolutionary history and memory still contested 250 years later. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Katherine French looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Dr. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, Dr. French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and Dr. French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership (New York University Press, 2025) documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists’ experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women’s organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, author Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women’s Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies. This episode includes a reference to the book Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell (Random House, 2025). Listen to Mitchell discuss her book at New Books in African American Studies, hosted by N’Kosi Oates. Dr. Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College: A Campus History (Arcadia Publishing, 2023). You can find Dr. McCray at her website, on Facebook, and on Instagram. Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dr. McCray continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Today we are joined by Aaron Miller, Lecturer in Kinesiology at California State University, East Bay and the author of Basketball in Japan: Shooting for the Stars (Routledge, 2025.) In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of basketball in Japan, the ongoing legacy of Samurai culture in Japanese sport, and what Japanese basketball’s success might look like in the future. In Basketball in Japan, Miller uses anthropological and ethnographic research approaches to ask why basketball in Japan is so popular with young people but less so with adults. Through a long series of conversation and observations, he leads readers to better understand the ways that sports shed light on shifts in Japanese identity. He also raises questions about to what extent Japanese coaches and players think about basketball in a specifically Japanese way. Building on a decade of research into Japanese sport and a year of field work inside of several Japanese sporting organizations, Miller’s compelling and readable account of Japanese basketball’s growing cultural status does not move chronologically. Instead, he uses his conversations with his interlocutors to address thematic questions that help him to explore the interplay between basketball and ideas of Japanese identity, gender, and race. His first chapter, “Be-longing” looks at the anonymized MU basketball club, a university sporting organization in Tokyo, as a total institution that thrived thanks to the commitment and discipline of an intergenerational group of administrators, coaches, players, and supporters. Their engagement was not without consequence – some of the players even likened basketball to a lover that took up all their time. In his second chapter, “Thinking Basketball”, Miller examines the tension between coaches who trained players based on the best practices of sports science, and the “commander ball” coach that drew on older notions of Japanese masculinity linked to notions of Bushido. Miller’s work teases out the conflicts: in practice, many players felt more comfortable with the more authoritarian styles of the coaches similar to those they had in youth basketball. Miller also found that no coach was a practitioner of purely “thinking” or “commander” ball – there was a fine gradient between the two styles. Many of the chapters address Japanese identity and the links between a Japanese way of playing sports and masculinity. In his chapter, “DNA”, Miller explores the inclusion of non-ethnically Japanese players into the Japanese game. He notes that the introduction of players from other countries has helped Japanese teams (from the high school to professional level) to improve competitively but it has also provoked considerable conversation about what it means to be Japanese and about whether people from overseas can meaningfully represent a school, a university, or the nation. In both “Boys, Be Ambitious” and “Waiting for a Male Hardwood Hero”, Miller points to the ways that sports in Japan have been coded as male. He notes that sexism in Japanese basketball means administrators have missed the opportunity to promote the successes of Japanese women in the WNBA and the Olympic Games. Miller’s deeply researched insider account into Japanese basketball from the late 19th century until today opens new avenues for considering physical culture beyond baseball and martial arts. Basketball in Japan will be of broad interest to scholars interested in Japanese culture and society, basketball buffs, and to readers with a general interest in sport. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Offering Southern feminist assessments of detailed case studies from 12 countries, this open access book Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19 (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides crucial insights into the gendered repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on macroeconomics, labour, migration and human mobilities, and care and social protection throughout the Global South. Using DAWN's interlinkages approach, the chapters provide a comprehensive and intersectional perspective on how the pandemic affected, and continues to affect people, especially women and girls of different ages, gender identity and sexual orientation, class, race, ethnicity, citizenship and migration status. Written by Southern feminist academics, activists and thinkers across Asia, Africa, the Carribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific, the volume highlights how the pandemic was often used as an opportunity to create periods of exception that compromised democratic processes. Contributors pay special attention to the opportunities for transformative practices that emerged during the pandemic, highlighting the role of resistance and social mobilization. By bringing to light important new forms of resistance the chapters make important interventions into critical debates on the role of the state, the market, civil society, and grassroots organizing in addressing pandemics, other complex crises, and their aftermaths. This volume ultimately challenges dominant narratives that overlook the gendered implications of crises, and in doing so provides an original, feminist analytical framework for understanding policy trends shaping realities the world over - one that offers concrete policy and practice recommendations for fostering southern-based feminist and social justice. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). Open access book here Southern Feminist Toolkit for Activism here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Existing portrayals of women who drink typically fall into two categories: disturbing stories of women hitting “rock bottom,” resulting in ruined careers, families, and futures, or amusing stories of fun and harmless “girls’ nights out,” with women drinking and overindulging as a temporary escape from a never-ending list of work and family demands. Drawing on original research and extensive interviews with a diverse group of women, author Susan Stewart challenges these stereotypes, revealing women’s complex relationships with alcohol and factors associated with its use. In On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Susan Stewart asks a question others might prefer stay buried: what about women's lives have changed such that they drink more alcohol? Stewart’s participants share stories of the many social forces that encourage women to drink: increased marketing of alcohol to women, the growing presence of alcohol in the workplace, pressure to drink from friends and family, and that drinking provides an easy “time-out” from children and housework. Stewarts' unvarnished examination of women and drinking challenges readers to think through its implications to individuals, families, and society. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about: escape rooms, the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities, and a study on belongingness in college and university. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

How many female entrepreneurs, economic revolutionaries, merchants, and industrialists can you name? You would be forgiven for thinking that, until very recently, there were none at all. But what about Phryne, the richest woman in ancient Athens, who offered to pay to rebuild the walls of Thebes after the city was razed by Alexander the Great? Or what about Priscilla Wakefield, the writer who set up the first English bank for women and children? And, just as important, what about the everyday women who, paid only a pittance, labored for the profit of others? From the most successful women of their day to those who struggled to make ends meet, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth, and Power (Seal Press, 2025) by Dr. Victoria Bateman takes you on a journey that begins in the Stone Age and ends in the twenty-first century, spanning the world’s historic centers of prosperity: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Peru, the Indus Valley, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Empire, China, Europe, and the United States. By shining a light on the women whose contributions to the economy have been hidden for far too long, Economica is more than a history of women—it is a more accurate economic history of us all. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harassment in schools. Title IX is the civil rights law that prohibits education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” At the time, however, the term “sexual harassment” was not yet in use; this kind of misconduct was simply accepted as part of life for girls and women at schools and universities. In Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX (Princeton UP, 2025), Celene Reynolds shows how the women claiming protection under Title IX made sexual harassment into a form of sex discrimination barred by the law. Working together, feminist students and lawyers fundamentally changed the right to equal opportunity in education and schools’ obligations to ensure it. Drawing on meticulously documented case studies, Reynolds explains how Title IX was applied to sexual harassment, linking the actions of feminists at Cornell, Yale, and Berkeley. Through analyses of key lawsuits and an original dataset of federal Title IX complaints, she traces the evolution of sexual harassment policy in education—from the early applications at elite universities to the growing sexual harassment bureaucracies on campuses today—and how the work of these feminists has forever shaped the law, university governance, and gender relations on campus. Reynolds argues that our political and interpretive struggle over this application of Title IX is far from finished. Her account illuminates this ongoing effort, as well as the more general process by which citizens can transform not only the laws that govern us, but also the very meaning of equality under American law. New Books in Women’s History Podcast Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College, website here @janescimeca.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Disco didn't just happen—it emerged from the vibrant gay club scene of 1970s New York City. In this episode, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares explore how iconic venues like the Continental Baths, the Mineshaft sex club, and the legendary Paradise Garage became part of a musical revolution that transformed popular culture. Joining them is Lucas Hilderbrand, Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of the groundbreaking book The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After (Duke University Press, 2023). Together, they trace the fascinating connections between New York's underground gay scene and the rise of legendary DJs like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles, while uncovering how these same spaces launched the careers of mainstream superstars, including Bette Midler and Barry Manilow. From intimate bathhouses to pulsing dance floors, discover how gay culture didn't just influence disco—it created it. The conversation also touches on Hilderbrand's companion archival project, The Bars Are Archived: Primary Sources for Gay Bars in America, which is available through Alexander Street's Queer Pasts collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Dr. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks. Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of the media, researchers and governments alike, discussions tend to either over-sensationalize the community or offer simplistic explanations for their existence. This book uses a mixture of historical and economic analysis, alongside actual Manosphere content, to delve deeper. With The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online (Polity, 2025), Simon James Copland explains how the Manosphere has developed and why it appeals to so many men. He argues that the Manosphere is not an aberration, but is deeply embedded within mainstream, neoliberal, social structures. For a cohort of alienated men, the promise of community provides a space of understanding, connection and purpose. This insightful book dares to dig into the corners of incel communities and online spaces where misogyny thrives. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand, and do something about, this growing and worrying phenomenon. Simon Copland is Honorary Fellow at the Australian National University. 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 here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In the fifth episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares sit down with the legendary DJ Nicky Siano. The history of dance music in 1970s New York is synonymous with the life and work of Siano. He was among the early attendees of David Mancuso’s Loft dances, where he learned to organize parties and DJ for an audience. Siano transposed Mancuso’s informal gatherings to a proper discotheque called The Gallery (1972-1977,) which he co-owned and DJed. At The Gallery, Siano pioneered techniques such as beatmatching, EQing, and using three turntables to fashion a proto-disco sound through his preferred selection of funky soul and R&B records, inspiring a host of celebrated figures like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles. The Gallery was a seminal 1970s nightclub that laid a blueprint for iconic New York clubs like the Paradise Garage and Studio 54. Siano is perhaps most well-known for DJing and being fired from Studio 54 for his unconventional methods. For Siano, music was more than pleasure. It was a source of empowerment, a refuge, and spiritual salve that has enabled him to persevere and thrive as a DJ in New York during the Seventies and beyond. In this conversation, Siano illustrates the power of music that animated his involvement as an activist in the Stonewall riots. As a DJ, Siano has maintained his belief in the capacity of music to bring people together, despite social differences, and as a healing force during the AIDs era. In this conversation, Siano traces his evolving romance with music, echoing his enduring salvo: Love is the Message. The title of this episode draws from a memoir that Nicky Siano is currently authoring, I, DJ: Stonewall to Studio 54. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Averill Earls is an associate professor in history at St. Olaf’s College and her research focuses on sexuality and modern Ireland. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Historical Reflections (in the top-visited issue of the journal to date), Perspectives Magazine, Nursing Clio, and Notches Blog. In 2021 she was awarded the Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize for her 2020 article, "Solicitor Brown and His Boy." Prof. Earls is also one of the four feminist historians and award-winning podcasters who founded Dig: A History Podcast in 2017. Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972 (Temple UP, 2025) tells the unexpected, sometimes heartbreaking, stories of Dublin’s men who desired men and the Gardaí who policed them. The book uncovers Ireland’s queer lives of the past. Averill Earls investigates how same-sex-desiring men lived and loved in a country where their sexuality was illegal and seen as unnatural. Across seven social biographical chapters, each highlighting individuals at the nexus of these histories, Earls constructs a narrative of experiences through the larger contexts in which they are embedded. She uses courtroom testimonies, police records, and family history archives as well as “educated speculation” to show how structures governing male same-sex desire in Ireland played out on the bodies of the men who desired men, the teen boys who sold sex to men, and the way the Catholic-nationalist ethos shaped the Gardaí who policed them. Love in the Lav examines the experiences of people such as cabbie James Hand, who was put on trial for gross indecency, to provide a window into the queer working-class subculture of 1930s Dublin. Earls also focuses on issues of consent, especially with teens, and the unregulated queer Irish world of public figures, including Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, Ronald Brown, and John Broderick. By examining twentieth-century Ireland through the lived experiences of ordinary same-sex-desiring Irish men who were relegated to obscurity by Irish society, Earls reveals the contradictions, possibilities, and magnitude of postcolonial Irish Catholic nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; to Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; to Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astounding female and gender-nonconforming artists wrestled snakes, performed magic tricks with electricity, and walked across waterfalls on tightropes, shattering taboos by performing in public. Betsy deftly explores how major forces in the long nineteenth century combined to create the uniquely American spectacle of the traveling circus. During the transformation of the circus from scrappy “mud shows” to a major international business, these extraordinary women challenged contemporary ideas of femininity, creating new possibilities for women far beyond the big top. Our guest is: Betsy Golden Kellem, who is a scholar of the unusual. She has served on the boards of the Barnum Museum and the Circus Historical Society, is the Emmy-winning host and writer of the Showman’s Shorts video series on P.T. Barnum, and writes for JSTOR Daily. An expert media and intellectual property attorney, she has taught at Yale and the University of Connecticut, and regularly speaks on the weirder corners of history and law. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a dissertation and writing coach, and a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Women’s History playlist for listeners: The World She Edited Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials We Refuse Tomboy Dear Miss Perkins The Lost Journals of Sacajewea The Untold Life of Julia Chinn Smithsonian American Women Share And Share Alike The House on Henry Street Speaking While Female Sophonisba Breckinridge Remembering Lucille Never Caught Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025) introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about fat people, their lives, and choices. Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order to understand this field, the book also explores its intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, migration and beyond. In addition to thinking through terminology and history, this book will aim to unpack three key myths which often guide Fat Studies, showing that: fat is a meaningful site of oppression intersected with other forms of discrimination and hatred to be fat is not a choice (but also that a discussion of choice is itself problematic); and fat cannot be unambiguously correlated with a lack of health Fat Studies: The Basics is a lively and accessible foundation for students of Gender Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Media Studies, as well as anyone interested in learning more about this emergent field. May Friedman is a Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In this episode, New Books Network Host Nina Bo Wagner speaks with Karen Bartlett about The Escape From Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance (The New Press and Duckworth, 2025). The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges, and set out to transform their country. Their work, however, posed an existential threat to everything the Taliban believed in. When the United States withdrew in August 2021, the women judges of Afghanistan faced mortal danger. Journalist Karen Bartlett goes beyond their escape, and talks about the Afghan women judges’ backgrounds, the cases they were tie breakers on, and the importance of the international network of women judges who helped them evacuate in 2021. Bartlett critiques the abandonment of Afghanistan by the West, and warns people not to normalise or be complacent to the Taliban regime which is still strongly opposed within the country. She also calls for the international community to take accountability for women judges who are still left in limbo or trapped in Afghanistan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies