New Books In Gender Studies

The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream audiences. Women are claiming high-profile roles as late-night hosts, sketch comedians, television producers, and standup stars. As they disrupt industry norms and transgress cultural boundaries, they have also become lightning rods for controversy, eliciting flares of anger, amazement, revulsion, or hope. Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars (Indiana UP, 2025) delves not only into the work of feminist icons like Samantha Bee, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Michelle Wolf, and Hannah Gadsby, but also into the discourse surrounding their comedy. Author Amber Day argues that these debates transcend mere entertainment; they are cultural battlegrounds for larger philosophical and political conflicts, interrogating ideals of gender, race, power, and public space. We see conflicts over what should be considered scandalous or beyond the pale, wh

The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream audiences. Women are claiming high-profile roles as late-night hosts, sketch comedians, television producers, and standup stars. As they disrupt industry norms and transgress cultural boundaries, they have also become lightning rods for controversy, eliciting flares of anger, amazement, revulsion, or hope. Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars (Indiana UP, 2025) delves not only into the work of feminist icons like Samantha Bee, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Michelle Wolf, and Hannah Gadsby, but also into the discourse surrounding their comedy. Author Amber Day argues that these debates transcend mere entertainment; they are cultural battlegrounds for larger philosophical and political conflicts, interrogating ideals of gender, race, power, and public space. We see conflicts over what should be considered scandalous or beyond the pale, wh

Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological support to the fledgling feminist movement against sexual violence. These entities promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable means of controlling rape, and they expected anti-rape organizers to embrace them. Yet Black women anti-rape organizers viewed police as a source of violence within their communities, not a solution to it. Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism amid the War on Crime (U Pennsylvania, 2025) examines how Black anti-rape organizers critically engaged both the feminist movement against sexual violence and the federal War on Crime between 1974 and 1994. In Philadelphia, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Atlanta, activists inflected Black women’s longstanding tradition of community-based caring labor with the Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and

The culture of mainstream American childhood is vastly different than the culture of Orthodox Jewish childhood - which is itself a rich and varied landscape of texts, music, toys, and more, with nuanced shadings from one sect of Orthodox Judaism to the next. In Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods: Personal and Critical Essays (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022), Dainy Bernstein has collected a treasury of essays examining the artifacts of Orthodox Jewish childhood and how they influence a child's developing view of the wider world - and their inner world. Interviewees: Dainy Bernstein holds a PhD in English and a Certificate in Medieval Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches college composition, medieval literature, and children's and Young Adult literature at Lehman College, CUNY. Goldie Gross earned a bachelor’s degree in art and business from Baruch College and earned a master’s degree in the history of art and archeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University Yehudis Keller earned a BA i

In Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020), Peace A. Medie studies the domestic implementation of international norms by examining how and why two post-conflict states in Africa, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, have differed in their responses to rape and domestic violence. Specifically, she looks at the roles of the United Nations and women's movements in the establishment of specialized criminal justice sector agencies, and the referral of cases for prosecution. She argues that variation in implementation in Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire can be explained by the levels of international and domestic pressures that states face and by the favorability of domestic political and institutional conditions. Medie's study is based on interviews with over 300 policymakers, bureaucrats, staff at the UN and NGOs, police officers, and survivors of domestic violence and rape — an unprecedented depth of research into women's rights and gender violence norm implementatio

Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall sheds light on known and forgotten movements and their unsung leaders, revealing how protest has shaped our nation and remains a vital force for change today. Drawing upon legal documents, archival material, memoir, government documents and secondary sources, A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2026) gives voice to those who pushed back against the mistreatment of others, themselves, and in some instances planet Earth. Browne-Marshall highlights stories of individuals from all walks of life, backgrounds, and time

Archival collections are political spaces: the decisions that govern whose histories are preserved, when, and by whom are not neutral. They reflect the communities that make them. For most of western history queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people were excluded from such communities. Premodern trans experiences went largely unreported and reconstructing such histories relies on the piecing together of ephemeral glimpses. Literary scholars developed tactics and tools to read through the traces, with hugely generative results that highlight the richness of non-normative premodern genders. But how do we move beyond the limits of the trace to uncover a more expansive history of premodern gender non-conformity? In Trans Histories of the Medieval Book: An Experiment in Bibliography (Arc Humanities Press, 2025), J.D. Sargan takes a methodological approach to that question. Sargan explores how experiment in applying trans approaches to the study of the premodern book offers alternatives both for trans historie

In this episode, New Books Network host Nina Bo Wagner talks to Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh about her new book Journalism and Gender: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2025). They discuss how gender continues to shape who produces the news, how stories are told, and whose voices are amplified or silenced in the global media landscape. Drawing on intersectional and transnational feminist frameworks, Journalism and Gender offers a sweeping account of the role gender plays in journalism across more than ninety countries, with a particular focus on the Global South. Geertsema-Sligh traces the evolution of women’s participation in the field, the persistence of male-dominated newsroom cultures, and the ways women and gender minorities are represented in coverage of politics, war, and violence. The book also explores gender in international media development, media activism, and journalism education—highlighting how feminist and intersectional approaches can drive meaningful change in the industry. Designed as an acc

When they gazed at the moon, medieval people around the globe saw an object that was at once powerful and fragile, distant and intimate—and sometimes all this at once. The moon could convey love, beauty, and gentleness; but it could also be about pain, hatred, and violence. In its circularity the moon was associated with fullness and fertility. Yet in its crescent and other shifting forms, the moon could seem broken, even wounded.  In this beautifully illustrated history The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing (Yale UP, 2025), Ayoush Lazikani reveals the many ways medieval people felt and wrote about the moon. Ranging across the world, from China to South America, Korea to Wales, Lazikani explores how different cultures interacted with the moon. From the idea that the Black Death was caused by a lunar eclipse to the wealth of Persian love poetry inspired by the moon’s beauty, this is a truly global account of our closest celestial neighbour. Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University

The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together essays that examine reproductive health through historical research and personal experience. Featuring both new and classic pieces from the Nursing Clio blog, leading historians of reproductive health, librarians, archivists, public health professionals and midwives provide insights that connect past struggles with today’s ongoing battles over bodies, reproductive rights, and health care. This collection offers intimate, urgent scholarship that speaks to the present moment. In this episode two representatives of the Nursing Clio Editorial Staff and one essay contributor discuss The Nursing Clio Reader. Sarah Handley-Cousins (University of Buffalo), Laura Ansley (American Historical Association), and Ayah Nuriddin (Yale School of Medicine) join Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) to talk about the recent publication, the origins of Nursing Clio, writing for public audiences

Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there was the comedienne who started it all. First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll (NYU Press, 2024) tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even outshone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joa

The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia (UCL Press, 2025) by Dr. Anna Shadrina examines the social production of ageing in post-Soviet Russia, highlighting the role of grandmothers as primary caregivers due to men’s traditional estrangement from family life. This expectation places grandmothers, or babushkas, in a position where they prioritise childcare and housework over their careers, making them unpaid family carers reliant on the state and their children. Dr. Shadrina situates older Russian women’s experiences within the post-Soviet redefinition of the nation, analysing their portrayal in popular media and biographical narratives of women aged 60 and over in Russia and the UK. It addresses class and racial disparities, noting how some women outsource family duties to less qualified women, and emphasises age as a significant but overlooked axis of social inequality. From a feminist perspective, the book explores citizenship as both a status and a practice of i

From hip-hop moguls and political candidates to talk radio and critically acclaimed films, society communicates that Black girls don’t matter and their girlhood is not safe. Alarming statistics on physical and sexual abuse, for instance, reveal the harm Black girls face, yet Black girls’ representation in media still heavily relies on our seeing their abuse as an important factor in others’ development. In this provocative new book, Aria S. Halliday asserts that the growth of diverse representation in media since 2008 has coincided with an increase in the hatred of Black girls.Dr. Halliday uses her astute expertise as a scholar of popular culture, feminist theory, and Black girlhood to expose how we have been complicit in the depiction of Black girls as unwanted and disposable while letting Black girls fend for themselves. She indicts the way media mistreats celebrity Black girls like Malia and Sasha Obama as well as fictional Black girls in popular shows and films like A Wrinkle in Time. Our society’s inabil

Joan Micklin Silver's groundbreaking debut feature film, Hester Street (1975), vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the eyes of Gitl (Carol Kane), a young, Orthodox Jewish woman who arrives in New York City from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Reunited with her already-assimilated husband, Gitl finds they now have little in common and she is forced to adjust to a new way of life. Hester Street achieved international critical and commercial success, and Kane received a Best Actress nomination at the 1976 Academy Awards.  Marking the film's 50th anniversary, Dr. Julia Wagner's landmark book Hester Street (Bloomsbury, 2025) is the first to focus exclusively on Micklin Silver's film. Wagner examines how, despite the sexism and prejudice that Micklin Silver faced, a low-budget, black-and-white, female-led, independent production with Yiddish dialogue became an unexpected box-office hit. Through close analysis, Dr. Wagner highlights the importance of Hester Street as a milestone

Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Femi

Patricia Anne Simpson joins Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Women's Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2025). The book examines the contributions of female writers, artists, scientists, religious leaders, and patrons who engaged in entrepreneurial, intellectual, and emotional labor in German-speaking Europe. Through individual and collective authorship, the women analyzed in this study assert a claim to kinship and community, often beyond the hegemonic, heteronormative relationships to family, religion, and monarch. The contributions of early modern women to the construction of productive work spaces and the establishment of intellectual and actual communities are often overlooked or underestimated in scholarship on this period. This book serves as a cultural corrective to suppositions of gender-coded work, because alongside the dominant history of the private sphere as a feminine domain, a counter-narrative emerges with collective authorship. Despite the disparities in their biogr

Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of the first pram in the 1700s, in recent decades, four-figure strollers have become not just status symbols but cultural identifiers. There are sleek jogging strollers for serious athletes, impossibly compact strollers for parents determined to travel internationally with pre-ambulatory children, and those featuring a ride-on kick board or second, less “babyish” seat, designed with older siblings in mind. Despite the many models available, we are all familiar with the image of a harried mother struggling to use a stroller of any kind in a public space that does not accommodate it. There are anti-stroller evangelists, fervently preaching the gospel of baby wearing and attachment parenting. All of these attitudes, seemingly about an object, are also revealing of how we believe parents and children ought to mov

In The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2023), the authors Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian conceptualise how gender, debt, and capitalism are related. For over ten years, the researchers have been working in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu, observing a credit market that specifically targets Dalit women. The book highlights not only the ways how credit is distributed, but also how it is repaid. Combining in-depth ethnography with statistical surveys and financial diaries advanced the understanding of how Dalit women deal with debt, exposing the ways in which capitalism shapes womanhood. The authors' nuanced attention to body, identity, caste, and class provides a comprehensive theory of the sexual division of debt for the first time.  Isabelle Guérin is Senior Research Fellow at the French Institute of Research for Sustainable Development, and Associate at the French Institute of Pondicherry. Santosh Kumar is a part-time researcher an

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies. However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional st