Sa’diyya Shaikh, “Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)

The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (U California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, Lundquist, and Lin illustrate how the seemingly open space of the internet interacts with the loss of social inhibition in cyberspace contexts, fostering openly expressed forms of sexual racism that are rarely exposed in face-to-face encounters. The Dating Divide is a fascinating look at how a contemporary conflux of individualization, consumerism, and the proliferation of digital technologies has given rise to a unique form of gendered racism in the era of swiping right--or left. The internet is often heralded as an equalizer, a seemingly level playing field, but the digital world also acts as an extension of and platform for the insidious prejudices and divisive impulses that affect social politics in the "real" world. Shedding light on how every click, swipe, or message can be linked to the history of racism and courtship in the United States, this compelling study uses data to show the racial biases at play in digital dating spaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 Mars 202348min

Amrita De talks about affective masculinities, aspirational linkages with dominant scripts of masculinities, socially organized. As she expands her work beyond her study of South Asian masculinities, she talks about how understanding and loosening these linkages entails crucial feminist work. She also talks about Shah Rukh Khan. Amrita De is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Center of Humanities and Information at Penn State University. Her research focuses on global south masculinity studies and affect theory. Her works have been published in NORMA, Boyhood Studies, Global Humanities and are forthcoming in other edited collections. She is also working her way through her first novel centered around contemporary Indian Masculinities. Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

27 Feb 202319min

"Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War. The role of comfort women in history remains a topic of importance — and emotion — around the world. It is well-known that an elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, were organised by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why did no local former comfort women come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s? To understand this silence, The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory (National University of Singapore Press, 2022) by Dr. Kevin Blackburn details the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Could it be that no former comfort women remained in Singapore after the war? Dr. Blackburn shows through a careful weighing of the different kinds of evidence why this was not the case. The immediate post-war years, and efforts to repatriate or ‘reform’ former comfort women fills in a key part of the history. Dr. Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore's memory: newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

17 Feb 202343min

Practicing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of 'shamefastness' was believed to reinforce women's chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures.  Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England (Manchester UP, 2019) uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from these emotional practices, as well as the ways in which they were satirised and reappropriated by male authors. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies and the history of emotions, it transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come. Mary C. Flannery is a Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellow at the University of Bern Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Feb 202342min

Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford UP, 2021) offers an important new theory of rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. While the Bible is filled with stories of rape, scholarly approaches to sexual violence in the scriptures remain exhausted, dated, and in some cases even un-feminist, lagging far behind contemporary discourse about sexual violence and rape culture. Graybill responds to this disconnect by engaging contemporary conversations about rape culture, sexual violence, and #MeToo, arguing that rape and sexual violence - both in the Bible and in contemporary culture - are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky, and that we need to take these features seriously.  Texts after Terror offers a new framework informed by contemporary conversations about sexual violence, writings by victims and survivors, and feminist, queer, and affect theory. In addition, Graybill offers significant new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 34), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1-2), and the unnamed woman known as the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). Texts after Terror urges feminist biblical scholars and readers of all sorts to take seriously sexual violence and rape, while also holding space for new ways of reading these texts that go beyond terror, considering what might come after. Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. Rachel Adelman is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible in the rabbinic program at Hebrew College in Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Feb 202350min

Shailaja Paik's book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) is an important reflection on the question of Dalit women and their sexuality question. Through the performance of Tamasha, Paik has relooked into the lifeworld of Dalit women and has argued about what the performance of Tamasha means in Dalit women’s everydayness rather than conventionally understanding it through a moral lens of good vs bad. The framework of ‘manuski’ and ‘assli’ reflects upon the Dalit women quest to transgress ascribed identities and it reinforces Dalit performance as a weapon for the weak. The work is a watershed as it re-centers Dalit woman’s experiences in the sex-gender-caste complex, rather than looking at them as passive recipients of male-centered Dalit assertion. Shailaja Paik is an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati. She is Taft's Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of fields concerning Modern South Asia, Dalit Studies, Women’s Studies, and oral History to mention a few.  Kalyani Kalyani is a sociologist and currently teaches at School of Arts and Sciences in Azim Premji University at Bengaluru. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

12 Feb 202344min

Have too much self-control?  You worked hard, followed the rules, and delayed gratification to get where you are in life. You played nice, did what you were told, and were rewarded for it. You have high expectations of yourself and for those around you. You have a strong sense of how the world should be and a consciousness of right and wrong. These are all admirable traits. Yet, your sex life and relationships suffer. Emotional distance has grown between you and your partner. Passion has diminished. Sex has become routine, assuming it happens at all. Your mind overthinks, making it impossible to relax: "Will the kids hear us?"; "My body's changed so much!"; "I have tons to catch up on and sex is a waste of time"; "What if I embarrass myself?" You fear uncertainty, especially about the future; you feel anxious, yet you want more out of life. You want to have fun with sex and be intimate and enjoy what you see others enjoying. You're not sure where to start though or if your thoughts and feelings will ever change. They can. Thomas L Murray's Making Nice with Naughty: An Intimacy Guide for the Rule-Following, Organized, Perfectionist, Practical, and Color-Within-The-Line Types (Clinical Training & Consultation, 2022) is an intimacy guide for turning down your dial on what is defined as an Overcontrolled (OC) Temperament and reclaiming psychological flexibility, child-like playfulness, adventure, and guilt-free pleasure-seeking.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

7 Feb 20231h 4min

In 1979, sociologist and NYIH founder Richard Sennett, and philosopher Michel Foucault, discussed the connections between the history of sexuality and self consciousness. In this episode from the Vault, the two discuss their research and, by extension, the underpinnings of the idea of solitude. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2 Feb 20231h 7min