New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

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

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

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Vaughan Rapatahana about sexual predation in the English language teaching industry. The conversation addresses his new book Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024), which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation. Trigger warning: this show discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners may find distressing. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic.  Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji). Ayo Wahlberg book Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (U California Press, 2018) explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it. Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the ‘sexual revolution’ in mid-twentieth century England. Rather than focusing on ‘Swinging London’, the book reveals the transformations in social life that took place in school playgrounds, local cinemas, and suburban bedrooms. Based on over 300 personal testimonies, Teenage Intimacies traces the everyday experiences of teenage girls, illuminating how romance, sex and intimacy shaped their young lives. The book shows how sex became embedded in ideas about ‘growing up’ and explores how heterosexuality influenced young women’s social lives and vice versa. It offers new explanations of why sexual mores shifted in this period, revealing the pivotal role that young women played in changing sexual values, cultures and practices in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Arguing that her writing works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether, Washington shows how she establishes a politics that ushers in a future built on plurality and possibility. Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, USA. Washington is the editor of a recent Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and is the author of Nonbinary Jane Austen, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Hope and Life in the Anthropocene (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and essays on the literature of the Romantic period and on contemporary theory and philosophy. Tristan Burke researches and teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and continental philosophy. He is the author of Byronism, Napoleonism, and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Heroes of Their Own Lives? (Routledge, 2022) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earliest and most loyal supporter. In her new book The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (Routledge, 2018), Marion Bower puts Joan Riviere herself, the woman and the psychoanalyst, in the spotlight. She shows how Riviere made use of the latest psychoanalytic ideas in a highly creative and original way, expressing herself with clarity and emotional depth in seminal works about the inner life of female sexuality and treatment impasses. She was able to draw from a lifetime of challenging and fruitful experiences. After a childhood rife with emotional neglect, she stepped into the rich ferment of the dying Victorian era and came in touch with major progressive forces of the time like the suffragettes and the Society for Psychical Research. As a dressmaker’s apprentice, she was among the first wave of women entering the work force. When the shifting soil of her childhood proved unstable, she entered analysis with Ernest Jones and, after becoming an analyst, with Freud himself. This personal connection proved fortuitous to the newly formed British Psychoanalytic Society, as it provided a solid anchor against the dividing drift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Bower paints an intimate portrait of a woman with a stern and sometimes vitriolic public persona and a shy and fragile personality that was saved by her involvement in psychoanalysis. In her best moments she was able to bridge that gap in her psychoanalytic writing, revealing herself through her theoretical musings. Marion Bower has trained as a teacher, social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked for many years in the child mental health services, including the Tavistock Clinic, and has edited and co-edited four books on various applications of psychoanalysis. She is currently co-editing a book on sexual exploitation. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the relationship between medicine and commerce? In Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Sarah Bull, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, explores the relationships between doctors, sexual reform campaigners, publishers and pornography in the Victorian era. The book charts the struggle to differentiate and define medicine from ‘quackery’, in the context of the rise of commercial forms of publishing and demands for access to contraception. The book uses richly detailed materials, including books and newspapers, court cases, and case studies of the key players who defined the era, and the years that would follow. Challenging myths of sex and Victorian society, and offering a compelling picture of conflicts over key issues such as free speech, contraception, and professional identity, the book will be of wide interest across the arts and humanities, as well as for medicine and science, and is available open access here Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts to enact the UN’s counter-trafficking protocol and assist Filipina migrants working in Japan’s sex industry, Dr. Faier draws from interviews with NGO caseworkers and government officials to demonstrate how these efforts disregard the needs and perspectives of those they are designed to help. She finds that these campaigns tend to privilege bureaucracies and institutional compliance, resulting in the compromised quality of life, repatriation, and even criminalization of human trafficking survivors. Dr. Faier expands on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” by coining the titular “banality of good” to describe the reality of the UN’s fight against human trafficking. Detailing the protocols that have been put in place and evaluating their enactment, Dr. Faier reveals how the continued failure of humanitarian institutions to address structural inequities and colonial history ultimately reinforces the violent status quo they claim to be working to change. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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/adchoices

Stories of teen sexting scandals, cyberbullying, and image-based sexual abuse have become commonplace fixtures of the digital age, with many adults struggling to identify ways to monitor young people's digital engagement. In When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age (Univ of California Press, 2023), Anna Gjika argues that rather than focusing on surveillance, we should examine such incidents for what they tell us about youth peer cultures and the gender norms and sexual ethics governing their interactions. Drawing from interviews with teens and high-profile cases of mediated juvenile sexual assault, Gjika exposes the deeply unequal and heteronormative power dynamics informing teens' intimate relationships and online practices, and she critically interrogates the role of digital cultures and broader social values in sanctioning abuse. The book also explores the consequences of social media and digital evidence for young victim-survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault, detailing the paradoxical capacities of technology for social and legal responses to gender-based violence. 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 on: 1.) escape rooms 2.) the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities. 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 (johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, security actors have become increasingly concerned with health issues. Bodily Fluids, Fluid Bodies and International Politics: Feminist Technoscience, Biopolitics and Security (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jenn Hobbs reveals how understandings of race, sexuality and gender are produced/reproduced through healthcare policy. Analysing the plasma of paid Mexicana/o donors in the US, airport vomit in Ebola epidemics and the semen of soldiers with genitourinary injuries, this book shows how security practices focus upon governing bodily fluids. Using a variety of critical scholarship – feminist technoscience, queer studies and critical race studies – this book uses fluids to reveal unequal distributions of life and death. 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

Envisioning queer futures where we lovingly wager everything for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly precarious times. Tamara Lea Spira's Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (U California Press, 2025) traces the shifting dominant meanings of queer family from the late twentieth century to today. With this book, Spira highlights the growing embrace of normative family structures by LGBTQ+ movements--calling into question how many queers, once deemed unfit to parent, have become contradictory agents within the US empire's racial and colonial agendas. Simultaneously, Queering Families celebrates the rich history of queer reproductive justice, from the radical movements of the 1970s through the present, led by Black, decolonial, and queer of color feminist activists. Ultimately, Spira argues that queering reproductive justice impels us to build communities of care to cherish and uphold the lives of those who, defying normativity's violent stranglehold, are deemed to be unworthy of life. She issues the call to lovingly wager a future for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly perilous times. Shui-yin Sharon Yam is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship and more recently, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin and Care (co-authored withe Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Embodying Normalcy: Women’s Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid work to embody the latest trends for the purpose of achieving success in neoliberal culture. Using TLC reality shows, lifestyle and beauty influencers, Brazilian butt lift TikToks, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian as her archive, Lucia Soriano delivers four case studies that draw on gender studies, media studies, disability studies, and American studies to illustrate how the prerequisite for women to succeed in neoliberal culture calls for them to treat their bodies as projects that must be transformed every day. Author Lucia Soriano is assistant professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and ethnic studies at Albion College. The episode is hosted by Ailin Zhou, PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California - Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What to do when a victorious soldier lusts for the beautiful woman he’s just taken captive in an overseas war. In fact, her body already belongs to him as war booty. If they’re alone in an alley, no one will find out what he does to her. That’s the incendiary situation to which the Bible responds with the Beautiful Captive Law. The Bible’s first step was to stop battlefield rape and protect the vulnerable woman from the powerful soldier. More than that, the Bible has strategies to get the soldier to control himself, even when no one is looking. Then the Bible brings the soldier to care for her, as the person she is. The Jewish tradition’s next major step was in the 12th century when it empowered the captive to decide for herself what direction she wants her life to take, including going free without marrying him. Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse (BfoT, 2025) shows how these strategies can work in our communities today, to reduce all kinds of sexual abuse. Tales of passion, martyrdom and a rare man who can “Just say no” to a rape he could have gotten away with -- can help us educate our youth toward a more respectful future for all gender relations, not just war-time rape. Surprises await both Bible-believers and Bible-skeptics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does Islam, particularly Shīʿī Islam, really say about same-sex sexual relations? Can Islamic legal frameworks, rooted in centuries of jurisprudence, ever be used to imagine the possibility of an Islamically valid same-sex marriage? What terms and categories did pre-modern Islamic sources use to describe what we might now call “homosexuality,” and what is meant by the claim that “homosexuality,” as a form of identity, is a modern concept? Is the story of Lot in the Qur’an really about homosexuality? And crucially, what Islamic perspectives exist in response to the deeply homophobic statement “Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in Islam,” published in May 2023 and endorsed by those who argue that Islam categorically rejects same-sex sexual relationships? In Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shīʿī Discourse (Brill, 2024), Mehrdad Alipour engages these urgent questions with intellectual rigor and legal precision. Alipour is a scholar of Iranian and Islamic studies whose work focuses on Islamic legal theory, Shi‘i thought, and the evolving discourse around sex, gender, and sexuality in both premodern and modern contexts. He earned his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter and received traditional training at the Seminary of Qom in Iran. He is currently based at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, where he leads the project Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Islamic Legal Tradition, exploring how intersex identities have been understood in Shi‘i legal texts from the 14th to early 20th centuries. Another publication of his, “Navigating Body Politics in Shiʿi Legal Tradition: Examining Sayyid Kāẓim al-Yazdī’s Account of Non-Binary Intersex,” is available online for free to all readers. Rather than offering a theological verdict or issuing new rulings in the book, Alipour turns to the internal tools of the Imāmī Shīʿī legal tradition—most notably, the method of ijtihād—to explore how scholars have historically interpreted and might yet reinterpret questions regarding sexual relations. Through a careful and brilliant analysis of Qur’anic verses, hadith traditions, legal principles, and rational argument, Alipour shows how the Shīʿī legal tradition contains interpretive possibilities that could speak to contemporary understandings of homosexuality as a consensual, identity-based, and egalitarian practice. As Alipour clarifies in our conversation, his study does not attempt to declare what Islamic law must say about same-sex relations, but rather to identify and expand the discursive spaces within which such a conversation can meaningfully take place. By using the very legal principles and interpretive strategies that have shaped Shīʿī jurisprudence across generations, he invites scholars and jurists to consider how Islamic legal thought might respond, faithfully and creatively, to modern realities. The book is a thoughtful and necessary contribution to ongoing debates on Islam, law, and sexual diversity. In our conversation today, Alipour walks us through the book’s key arguments and findings, highlights the significance of applying modern Imāmī ijtihādic principles to the question of same-sex relations, and outlines how core Islamic sources—the Qur’an, sunnah, reason (ʿaql), and consensus (ijmāʿ)—have been interpreted in relation to same-sex intimacy, with special attention to specific gaps in the story of Lot in the Qur’an. He also clarifies key premodern terms that are often cited by contemporary Muslim scholars as referring to homosexuality, unpacking their historical meanings and legal contexts. This here is my conversation with Mehrdad Alipour on his book, Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shīʿī Discourse (Brill, 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of queer politics in the United States since 1968 is commonly narrated as either a progressive campaign for state recognition or as a subcultural rejection of prevailing gender norms. But these accounts miss the true scale of queer politics in the post-war era. By centering transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures in the history of sexual rebellion, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2025) provides an alternative view of US-based struggles for sexual freedom. Dr. Alexander Stoffel analyzes three prominent US-based social movements—gay liberationism, Black lesbian feminism, and AIDS activism—to argue that they were fundamentally shaped by their transnational entanglements. Departing from popular domestic framings of these movements, Dr. Stoffel recasts the history of radical queer thought and action as a project of erotic worldmaking. This project mobilized queer affects of pleasure, desire, and eroticism in the fight for revolutionary transformation on a world scale. The transnational perceptions, activities, and consciousness of queer radicals, Dr. Stoffel argues, not only conditioned the trajectory of queer history, but also radicalized wider anti-imperialist, socialist, and abolitionist struggles past and present. In this ambitious and interdisciplinary work, Dr. Stoffel reconsiders the United States' revolutionary sexual past and creates new opportunities for the study of sexual formations in relation to questions of capital accumulation, empire, and resistance. 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

In Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895. In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. In Geographies of Gender, Dr. Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways which highlight the instability of metropole-colony relations. 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. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. 150 million lifetime downloads. Advertise on the New Books Network. Watch our promotional video. Learn how to make the most of our library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex change” in the press from the 1920s to the 1940s, and a famous case of the “first” Chinese transsexual in 1950s Taiwan. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in China, and will be of special interest for readers who are interested in bringing Foucault-inspired analyses to the craft of history. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices