New Books in Gender Studies

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] Nature or nurture? Inborn or learned? Genetic or extra-genetic? Humans are so complicated that in many cases we can’t really know what is “in us” from the beginning and what is “acquired” as we learn. And even when we find something that is “in us,” we can often find a way to modulate or mask it. Given all this, sometimes the best–and certainly most convincing–evidence that some trait is inborn rather than acquired is simple, honest testimony. Such is the case, I think, with homosexuality. In Jonathan Rauch‘s remarkable and moving memoir Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul (The Atlantic Books, 2013) the author explores exactly what it was like to deny his own sexual orientation for over two decades. Actually, “deny” is not really the right word, at least for what Rauch did in his early years. To “deny” is to realize the possibility of something and reject it. For much of his early life, Rauch never even entertained the idea he was gay, so he couldn’t very well deny it. It just wasn’t possible. He thought he was just weird. But as he matured, it did dawn on him that maybe, just maybe, he might be gay. Not surprisingly given the prejudice against homosexuality at the time he was growing up, the very possibility frightened him. He did not want to be gay. Who would want to be gay? Why would you put yourself through that? So he denied it. Until there came a time when he met kind, loving people who told him that he really should and could be who he was. They would help him. And they did. Jonathan Rauch then became  what he had never really been–Jonathan Rauch.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] Most countries, believing that married people form a kind of demographic and political bedrock, promote marriage (and, of course, child-having within wedlock). Nonetheless, many couples choose to live together before marriage and many choose not to get married at all. Their numbers are increasing all over the developed world at a remarkable rate. Co-habitation is now more than “shacking up”; it’s a common life-choice. In  Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution (Chicago UP, 2012), Elizabeth H. Pleck examines the rise of cohabitation and asks whether cohabiters have not become second class citizens. She says they have and has some suggestions about how to give them the same opportunities those who married have.

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts’ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013) draws on a wealth of material from French and American archives to show us that the war was an experience saturated with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Battles were critical, of course, but so too was sex. The American GI in war-torn France was a soldier, a tourist, a liberator, and also a destroyer. Military propaganda represented the Normandy campaign as a soldier’s opportunity for sexual adventure, framing the invasion and occupation of France in terms of the rescue of damsels in distress by heroic tough guys from a manly nation. Convinced of the hyper-sexuality of French women and culture, many American soldiers courted, paid for sex with, and even assaulted women they met in French homes, streets, hotels, and brothels. This is a book about what American GIs thought about France; what they did while they were “over there”; how French women and men received and responded to the “advances” of American troops; and the lasting impact of this complex set of encounters on individual lives, communities, and politics.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Philosophy] What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression & Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Native American Studies] The suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school,” writes Beth H. Piatote. “A turn to the domestic front, even as the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.” Yet the domestic space was not only a target of invasion; it was also a site of resistance, a fertile ground for Native authors to define what counted as love, home, and kin in an era of coercive assimilation. In Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), Piatote brilliantly reads the work of late nineteenth century writers like Pauline Johnson, S. Alice Callahan, D’arcy McNickle and others as a contest over settler domestication. Piatote offers an eloquent exploration of incredible courage and literary acumen, with resonance in our own political moment.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies] Divorce was virtually impossible in Imperial Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church monopolized matrimony, and it rarely granted divorce except in extraordinary cases of adultery, abandonment, sexual impotence, or exile. Marriage as an unbreakable religious sacrament still held. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, Russian perceived a “crisis of marriage” as social and economic change upset the traditions of wedlock and family life. Where, then, did a discordant couple turn? As Barbara Engel shows in Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Cornell UP, 2011), appealing to the Imperial Chancellery for the Receipt of Petitions served as an extra-legal means of marital separation. Through the Chancellery, supplicants, overwhelming of which were married women, could get the legal right to live separate from their husbands. But these appeals reveal much about married life in Russia. Through these cases, Engel spins a lively and intimate tale of marital conflict, gender identity, home life, and Russian women’s efforts to assert an autonomous selfhood and identity by challenging nuptial traditions.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Many people have probably heard of Betty Friedan, Bela Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Andrea Dworkin, all stars of Second Wave Feminism. They were also all Jewish (by heritage if not faith). As Melissa R. Klapper shows in her new book Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (New York University Press, 2013), this was no accident. Freidan et al. inherited a rich tradition Jewish women’s activism in the U.S. These women did not burn their bras (it’s not clear that any feminists did, actually), but they did fight for the vote, for birth control, and for peace. In this interview, Melissa explains why, how, and to what extent they succeeded.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sociology] What does it mean to be gay? According to many people, gayness is simply homosexuality – a sexual orientation. However, as David M. Halperin argues in his new book How to be Gay (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), being gay is about more than just sex. In fact, gay men learn how to develop a gay cultural subjectivity through other gay men. Gay culture is phenomenon that is as often denied as it is accepted, as is evidenced by the many stereotypes often associated with gay people, played out in movies and TV shows on a regular basis.  Halperin argues that there is a “queer way of feeling,” and that gay subjectivity should be discussed and studied, not dismissed and denied. Despite the catchy title, How to be Gay is a thoroughly academic and detailed book, which seriously dives into the research of gay subjectivity and style. In this interview, he explains how modern day gay identity has been promoted at the expense of gay subjectivity.

This year is the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion nationwide.  Indeed, 40 years ago today, women and men around the country were talking about the decision which they had heard on the news earlier in the day.  Some, excited by the Supreme Court decision, were planning to open abortion clinics.  Others saw the decision as a terrible mistake and were debating how to organize against the Supreme Court decision.  For the past four decades, the fetus has featured prominently in this conflict.  But our understanding of the fetus as a historical subject is fairly limited. Prompted in large part by the rising abortion debate, historians, sociologists and medical anthropologists began in the 1990s to study the fetus and the impact which medical technology has had on our view of pregnancy and the fetus.  Medical technology, these authors have cautioned, did not merely advance our understanding of the fetus, but also contributed to a view which positioned women and the fetus in opposition to each other, with competing interests and rights.  Several scholars have examined the impact which changing notions of pregnancy and the fetus have had on public policy.  Sara Dubow’s Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2010) contributes significantly to our understanding of the ways in which the fetus was constructed – both through medical technology and imagination – and the ways in which the changing meaning of the fetus shaped the lives of pregnant women.  Her careful attention to the ways in which medical technology contributed to changes in the social construction of the fetus and influenced the laws governing women’s lives makes this a book not to be missed

I have long been an admirer of Dan Healey’s work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important contribution our understanding of the history of homosexuality; Healey’s new book follows logically from his previous one. In Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), he takes us from the establishment of a gay identity and community to the new Russian state as it seeks to define its position vis a vis sexuality. With the Bolshevik revolution, revolutionaries decided to modernize Russian sexual science and beliefs. Russian sexual scientists were already in conversation with their Western European colleagues and sought to modernize and rationalize sexual relations between women and men. Policy makers introduced a number of reforms to aid in the process of modernization. They abolished the age of consent, for instance, and replaced it with an age of maturity. Bolsheviks also envisioned a modern role for science in the new Russian state – one that brought the psychiatrists into the justice system. These new sexual experts began to link sex crimes to mental disease, described and diagnosed sexual psychopathy, and they began a systematic investigation of the bodies of hermaphrodites. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics discusses these developments and their impact on sexual beliefs and the regulation of sexuality. Given the archival record, Healey does not attempt to predict how these changes influenced sexual experience. Court records, he notes, are largely silence on the impact that “modern visions” of sexuality had on young rape victims, for instance. Instead, Healey does what the records allow him to do: trace the changing role of sexual experts and sexual science of people of the young Russian nation tried to distance themselves from the old tsarist beliefs – yet lapsed over and over again into traditional notions of sexuality. Listen as Dan Healey tells us about his new book, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] My wife is a sports fan.  Together, we have cheered from the stands at college football games and track meets, for local minor-league baseball clubs and hockey teams.  We’ve spent Sunday afternoons watching the National Football League, October nights watching the World Series, and summer afternoons watching the World Cup.  We once waited in line for hours for tickets to the national college basketball tournament, and another time we awoke in the early-morning darkness, while living in Europe, to watch the live broadcast of the Olympic hockey final.  She has cheered, groaned, jumped from her seat in excitement, and slumped in despair.  But now, after lifetime of following sports, she has declared that her days as a fan are coming to an end.  What has brought this turn away from sports?  It’s not the outrageous salaries or loutish behavior of athletes.  It’s not scandals or cheating or excess.  It’s her sons—our sons.  At ages 14 and 11, our boys talk sports constantly.  And they talk in obsessive detail, like typical males: statistics, standings, predictions, post-game analyses, historical debates, and hypothetical speculations. For my wife, who has been an athlete and a fan since childhood, the incessant talk is more than she can bear. My wife’s dilemma is common to female sports fans.  As Andy Markovits and Emily Albertson explain in their new book, female fans think and talk about sports in a vastly different way than do male fans.  Even the most avid women fans, whom Andy and Emily call “sportistas,” do not debate potential transfer signings, or recite from memory the announcer’s call from a classic match, or quiz each other on starting lineups from decades ago.  Unfortunately, however, women who follow sports find that male fans use these kinds of conversations as an entrance requirement to their circle.  “You don’t know who hit the winning home run in the 1960 World Series!  How can you be a REAL fan?!!”  Yet, even when a woman does know the name Bill Mazeroski, she still is not accepted.  Instead, the male fan sees her as a threat. Sportista: Female Fandom in the United States (Temple University Press, 2012) looks at the barriers that women fans face as they follow sports.  Andy and Emily discuss the different ways that males and females talk about and consume sports and the roots of those differences.  Their conclusions, based on interviews with women fans and sports journalists, match what my wife has discovered in our household.  For her, sports are drama and entertainment and a spectacle of human accomplishment.  For our sons, sports is life.

In August of 2009, the South African runner Caster Semenya won the 800 meter final in the world Championship leading by one minute. “Muscles bulging and triumphant hand aloft,” the news reported, “she crossed the line way ahead of the rest of the field and ran straight into accusations that she was far too strong, too fast and, to be blunt, too masculine to be a woman.” The International Association of Athletics Federation requested that Semenya undergo gender testing. For months, Semenya and the IAAF awaited reports from a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist, an internal medicine specialist, and an expert on gender. When the results were finally released, news headlines ranged from “Caster Semenya is a hermaphrodite with no womb or ovaries” in the Sydney Daily Telegraph to Salon.com’s claim that “Castor Semenya is not a hermaphrodite…but intersex.” This news must have come as a shock to Semenya. Today we are going to talk to Elizabeth Reis, author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex  (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). A women’s and Gender Studies scholar and Historian at the University of Oregon, Reis tells us about the history of those who are of ambiguous sex. From early America, when people looked at doubtful bodies as bodies that created legal and religious concern to the 19th century, when physicians began to take over the classification and management of bodies lacking a clear gender identity. This is a remarkable book. And we are glad to have Elizabeth Reis on our show today. The shock with which Semenya – and others like her — must have received this news – as well as the debate over the proper nomenclatura concerning individuals who show sex characteristics of both men and women are among the fascinating topics raised by Elizabeth Reis’ book Reis, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at the University of Oregon, analyzes the history of bodies of doubtful gender from early America to the present. Her narrative illustrates how anomalous bodies were initially associated with monstrous births, of concern mostly to legal and clerical authorities. In the 19th century, physicians began to take over the classification of doubtful bodies. Soon, they were involved not only in identifying the sex of their patients’ bodies but also in altering doubtful bodies to create gender certainties. Reis traces the rise and fall of medical treatment protocols for the intersex. She concludes with a thoughtful chapter on naming in which she discusses the move away from the term hermaphrodite – which evoked images of mythical creatures and was considered derogatory. Hermaphrodite was followed by the term intersex. But to many, this term seemed too sexualized. It also suggested the existence of a third sex – when many really only wanted two. Recently, physicians have begun to use Disorders of Sex Development [DSD] to refer to the intersex condition. The Disorders in DSD, however, pathologizes the condition. Reis herself suggests Divergence of Sex Development as a more neutral option. If nothing else, the evolution of terminology itself illustrates how sensitive and political the naming and categorizing of gender is. Bodies in Doubt is a terrific contribution to our understanding of sex, gender, and the creation of our two gender system. If you are as fascinated with these issues as I am, you must read this book.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley’s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions about seemingly basic categories like marriage, freedom, and sex. It also maps the ways that the spaces of prostitution in early modern Japan transformed together with the rise of a market economy, leading us from major cities like Edo and Nagasaki, through mining towns and ports, to pilgrim sites in the Inland Sea. While the increasing commercialization of the Tokugawa economy was liberating for some, creating new opportunities for travel and leisure, Stanley shows that this new “freedom” was actually oppressive for many women. Initially understood as filial daughters embedded in families and communities that they worked to support, by the 19th century women who worked in the sex trade were increasingly seen as autonomous economic actors. As their bodies became commodities, prostitutes became symbols of the destructive influences of urban culture in the villages to which they increasingly came to work. Stanley’s book introduces these women and their world in a book that is rich with case studies that bring us into the lives of individual prostitutes, their families and employers, and the fascinating documents that allow us a glimpse into their stories.

When I saw Nwando Achebe‘s book  The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011), I thought: “Really? A female king? Cool!” It turns out Ahebi Ugbabe was not only a female king, but also a female husband and father. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ahebi Ugbaba was born late in the nineteenth century in Igboland, in present-day Nigeria. She fled home to escape her community’s dedication of her in marriage to a deity to compensate for a crime her father had committed. The marriage would have reduced her to the status of a slave. After twenty years as a prostitute and trader in exile, she returned and established herself: first as headman, then as warrant chief, and finally as king. For a biological woman to transform herself into a social man was a familiar practice in Igboland. But for anyone to be chief or king was not. The Igbo had practiced communitarian rule by groups of elders; it was the British who imposed rule by a single person. It was perhaps inevitable that Ahebi’s rule would be troubled. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugabe is a fascinating exploration of the fluidity of gender and the nature of political authority. And it’s a remarkable reconstruction not only of colonial rule at the local level, but also of pre-colonial life and post-colonial memory. I highly recommend Nwando Achebe, Professor of History at Michigan State University, is the winner of  both the Barbara “Penny” Kanner Prize and the Gita Chaudhuri Prize of the Western Association of Women Historians.

Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, turn their backs to her. The girl is Abina, the men are “Important Men,” and together they grace the cover of of Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collaborative effort of historian Trevor R. Getz and graphic artist Liz Clarke. In 1876 Abina took her former master to court in the British-controlled Gold Coast for having enslaved her. She had already escaped to freedom: she seems to have brought charges simply because she wanted her experience of slavery to be recognized. It wasn’t. Abina lost her case. But in reconstructing Abina’s story in graphic form, Getz and Clarke bring it to present-day readers. And they also bring important questions to the students who are the intended audience of this book: What background information do we need to understand Abina’s story? Whose voices do we hear, and whose don’t we hear? What do historians do when they don’t know all the details of a story? Trevor R. Getz is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, and Liz Clarke is a professional artist and graphic designer based in Cape Town, South Africa. Together, they bring a silenced voice back to life, and they do it in an enormously engaging way.