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New Books in Gender

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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#2611
Thursday · 52 min
No! The Art and Activism of Complaining
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Sara Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work. Where complaints live, how comp
#2610
Wednesday · 34 min
Reimagining Foreign Aid in a Changing Global Order with Mary-Collier Wilks (Stanford UP, 2026)
What happens to foreign aid (and to women’s status) when the global development landscape shifts away from U.S. dominance? In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with sociologist Mary-Collier Wilks about her book Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia (Stanford UP, 2026). They discuss the contrasting approaches of U.S., Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese donors, the rise of competing regional models of development, and w
#2608
October 17 · 1 hr 1 min
Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women with Eleanor Johnson (Princeton UP, 2026)
For as long as human societies have been telling stories, the patriarchy has felt threatened by women. In this book, Eleanor Johnson provides an engaging cultural history of a figure she calls the “monstrous bitch,” the notorious female who has haunted the patriarchal imagination for centuries, feared for her sexual promiscuity, her exercise of reproductive agency and control, and her outspoken way of contesting patriarchal power. In a narrative brimming with insight, Johnson traces the origins
#2609
October 17 · 47 min
Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain with Lise Shapiro Sanders (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Lise Shapiro Sanders is the author of Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early 20c Britain, published in October 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic Press. Reading for Pleasure analyzes the early 20th-century British romance as a genre directed at young working women, including those employed in factories, shops and department stores, and the service industry. It explores a range of popular romances in the form of novels, films, and periodicals, and thinks about how these t
#2607
October 16 · 40 min
How Dungeons and Dragons Changed the Way We Play with Aaron Trammell (Duke UP, 2026)
In How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play (Duke University Press, 2026), Dr. Aaron Trammell excavates the game as an artifact of a burgeoning counterculture obsessed with individualism as well as quantification. Mapping the world onto a grid, building characters whose every trait is assigned a point value, and advancing the game’s narrative through dice throws—countless core mechanics are tied to numbers.
#2606
October 12 · 1 hr 6 min
Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel with Rafael Walker (U Chicago Press, 2025)
The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entrench a liberal model of the individual: the self as autonomous and perfectible. Pushing back against these and other received ideas, Rafael Walker offers a self-professed “heretical” view of the history of the American novel in Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel (U Chicago Press,
#2605
October 8 · 1 hr 50 min
Immoral Traffic An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India with Vibhuti Ramachandran (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their effor
#2604
October 7 · 54 min
Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory with Heather Berg (Duke UP, 2026)
“If whores were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” (ix). Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory (Duke UP, 2026) opens with a quote from Clara expanding on the Combahee River Collective 1977 statement. Interweaving interviews and writing by sex workers like Clara, Notes from the Sex Worker Left by Heather Berg offers a political theory that critiques family/couple-form, work, and state, envisioning militant community care. Rejecting the pressure to fit into a cat
#2603
October 6 · 1 hr 15 min
Egyptian Male Film Stars in the Nasser Era: Envisioning a National Identity with Samar Abdel-Rahman (American U of Cairo Press, 2026)
Samar Abdel-Rahman's Egyptian Male Film Stars in the Nasser Era: Envisioning a National Identity (American University of Cairo Press, 2026) explores male stardom in Egyptian cinema produced during the early years following the Free Officers' revolution of 1952, through the lives and careers of three key stars: Omar al-Sharif, Ismail Yassin, and Farid Shawqi. In attempting to find a balance between the traditional and the modern, the Nasser era placed an emphasis on education, work, and gender eq
#2602
October 6 · 56 min
Women in Comics: Iconic Characters and Influential Creators 1923-Today with Susan E. Kirtley and Nhora Lucía Serrano (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026)
Susan E. Kirtley and Nhora Lucía Serrano's Women in Comics (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is a richly illustrated, essential guide to the importance of women in the comics space from across time and around the globe. Comics in the form of editorial cartoons, comic strips, digital comics, comic books, and graphic novels have combined words and images to tell stories of hundreds of years. Though often overlooked, women have played a vital role in shaping this genre, both as creators and characters
#1551
October 1 · 1 hr 4 min
How Girls Achieve
How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender. Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet milli
#1549
September 27 · 50 min
Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing with Marion Quirici (Syracuse UP, 2025)
Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse UP, 2025) explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion that justified imperial rule in Ireland and the forms of oppression that continued after independence. Marion Quirici identifies models of citizenship and creative autonomy in Irish modernist literature that valorize vulnerability over ability and interdependence over independence. She uncovers a
#1548
September 26 · 52 min
Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan with Muhammad A. Kavesh (U Washington, 2026)
Across Pakistan's rooftops, pigeon flyers devote enormous care and labor to birds that soar the skies, take part in competitions, and knit together communities otherwise divided by caste, class, language, and ethnicity. Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan (U Washington, 2026) follows these flyers across four provinces, revealing a world of shauq (passionate pursuits) where training, feeding, and flying become affective acts to welcome a more-than-human oth
#1550
September 26 · 1 hr 22 min
Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe with Sophie Lewis
This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both
#1546
September 25 · 32 min
Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media, Empathy, and Digital Testimony with Xinling Li (Anthem Press, 2026)
When the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers appeared in April 2023, few anticipated its impact beyond the screen. Within weeks, survivors in politics, the media, academia and the arts began sharing experiences of sexual harassment and assault, giving momentum to Taiwan’s long-delayed #MeToo movement. XinLing Li’s new book, Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media, Empathy, and Digital Testimony (Anthem Press, 2026), asks how a fictional series became a cultural catalyst. Li ar
#1545
September 24 · 49 min
Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico
Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico (Feminist Press, 2025) gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, dismantling its Eurocentric roots and directing its critical thrust towards current affairs in Mexico today. Asserti
#1544
September 21 · 1 hr 38 min
Glenn Peers, "Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Art: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy" (ARC Humanities Press, 2026)
Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and
#1543
September 19 · 1 hr 8 min
Pushpesh Kumar et al. eds., "Sociology of Gender in India: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Sociology of Gender in India brings together feminist and queer scholarship to chart the changing landscape of gender debates in Indian sociology. Spanning over five decades of disciplinary evolution, this volume interrogates how gender, caste, sexuality, class, and digitalisation intersect in shaping contemporary social life. With chapters by a new generation of scholars, it critically engages with foundational debates in kinship, marriage, labour, media, nationalism, and pedagogy, while foregr
#1540
September 18 · 1 hr 32 min
Rosie Findlay, "Dressays: An Anthology" (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2026)
The clothes we inherit, covet, purchase, borrow, wear, store, destroy, or give away are intricately woven into our ideas about who we are and how we relate to others and the world around us. Clothes are things that can console us or trouble us. They can be objects buoyant with cherished memories and self-affirming associations—or weighed down with loss, disappointment, or other difficult feelings. Sometimes, they can be both at once. Dressays (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2026) is a new collection o
#1542
September 17 · 38 min
Bryant Simon, "For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies. For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a f

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