New Books in Gender

• Anthony Michael Petro, "Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars" (Oxford UP, 2025)

  In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 2025), Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political. Through captivating case studies of "subversive" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred. Anthony M. Petro is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at University of Notre Dame (effective fall 2025). His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion, was a finalist for the Religion Newswriters Association's book award for nonfiction. An early chapter from this book also won the 2012 LGBTQ Religious History Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. In 2019-2020, Petro was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Clayton Jarrard is a graduate student at NYU's XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

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• Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

  When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women's movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality. In Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures--Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area--to Harvard, MIT, and other universities--to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women's movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers' comments about women in science thirty years later. Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world. Christa Kuljian grew up in the Boston area, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for the past thirty years. She is a science writer and the author of Sanctuary and Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, which was short listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Currently a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University, she is also a fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Medicine and Technology (CHSMT) in Philadelphia. Caleb Zakarin is editor of 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

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• Foluke Taylor, "Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room" (Norton, 2023)

  In 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following: “The psychological toll of being a Black woman…can never be underestimated. There is a low value placed on Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level and yet we feel the need to struggle to change the condition of all Black women.” Almost 50 years later, we have a book that responds to this important group’s felt need. Foluke Taylor’s Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room, delivers an archive of Black feminisms that are leveraged to explore certain psychoanalytic truths. This ambitious trajectory is however delightfully embedded within a text that also includes the potential of musical accompaniment: she prompts us to tune into Billy Paul, Sault, Norman Connors and many other musicians. Read Taylor and turn up your speakers: let your senses rise and fall, clap and hum. The book depends in part on the author’s personal reflections that in their tenderness, read, at least to my ear, as rather different from auto theory. Indeed, Taylor seems not to be embracing a tributary of critical theory through which she then allies herself. Rather there are aspects of her history that beautifully accompany and highlight what is a heart-rending treatise about the lay of the land traversed by Black women who seek to train to become clinicians and by Black women who come to lie on the couch, a terrain that can be unduly rough, distorting, dangerous. Chapter by chapter, Taylor is conducting a chorus of Black feminist thinkers, women with whom she works in ongoing movement to transform and trouble what subjugates and suffocates the lives of Black women. A clinician herself, she places a special emphasis on the practice of psychotherapy, demonstrating how it can participate in deadly, racist repetitions. The book has an interior design that reminds me of the way one might arrange furniture in a room, a living room as it were. There are bolded quotes, in the upper right hand corner perhaps or the bottom left, demanding attention. Sometimes the same quote is reproduced more than once in a chapter. These quotes are the equivalent of textual wall hangings that live on the page. They take on a physicality, almost like an ottoman by the reading chair, a place to stop and stay put, feet off the ground. I experienced them also as obstacles: I had to consider them in order to move forth. Taylor’s voice is intimate and readers are assumed into a position, dropped into her mind at times mid-sentence: a thought is forming and we are there for its birth. She offers radical hospitality, breathing us into being. All who create life, she reminds us, must breathe for those they carry forth. This she also does. The voices of African feminists were new to me and reflective of her having left London for ten years to seek her origins in Africa, looking for her place in the world. This is where her sharing of her early life is put to powerful use as she wonders with bell hooks, with Hortense Spillers, hardly alone, yet alone, “where do I come from?” This question is one that belongs to all people whose lineages have been truncated by enslavement. Tracy D Morgan is the founding editor of New Books in Psychoanalysis, and works as a psychoanalyst in Rome, Italy and Brooklyn, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

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• Marion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018)

  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 [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

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• Joseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)

  In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class--once considered a de facto "white" category--over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations.Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

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